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WOMEN AND
OTHER WOMEN

WOMEN AND ,
OTHER WOMEN

ESSAYS IN WISDOM

HILDEGARJ^E ' HAWTHORNE

« •

NEW YORK
DUFFIELD & COMPANY

1908 , ..,./

Uri

I 748983 |

. ••• .. •

• • • • •

• • ••* • ."

My Friend
MARY WILSHIRE
Dear Mary:

Many of these papers were written under
your roof and with your inspiring criticism,
that builds rather than destroys, to help
them into being. It is a happiness to me
to associate this volume with your name, as
it is a greater happiness to know myself
your friend. And though the book may be
evanescent enough, I dare to believe that
the friendship is of enduring quality.
Yours,

HlLDEGARDE HAWTHORNE.

CONTENTS

PAGE

Forerunners . . •> i

The Arrival of Woman . • • . 16
The Soul of the Celtic Race ... 29

Woman in All Ages 35

Women and Gardens 45

Sex and Society 52

Pope's Lady Mary 65

Pictures of England 79

The Parish Clerk of Old .... 95
Mr. Slicer on Happiness .... 106
The New Hero ....... 112

~ Nazimova 117

Footsteps 127

The Wisdom of Animals . . . . 131
*j Vision 143

A Record of Queens 151

vii

V1U

Contents

Love as a Joke .
Maia ....
The Sense of Duty
Advice to a Girl .
Cinderella . .
The Valley Road
The Burning Bush

page

v • . 170

• - • *77

••1 [«i i*. Io2

•« « • 190

.. . .199

•1 »; . 205

. . . 212

J i 'i Or ULVV iUji(\

FORERUNNERS

THERE has been much noise in the
world, clatter and turmoil, and the
hand-to-hand , struggle with the forces of
nature and- between man~ ^rid man. So
much as -almost t to smother &£ -finer music
of that spiritual progress whicVisthe only
real, and abiding advance man may make.
The material acts of life are not its real
actsr, 'bttt^of necessity it is they thajjare rec-
ognised.* ' t When Caesar shook ;the world
with irie hurled missile of his k^ons, that
world hailed him, in, terror. ai\d. t admiration
as its master* Caesar, however, died, and
his conquests- dropped away 'and mattered
no more. Yet there was something that
survived.

For the spirit of humanity, reaching at
that time its apogee in Caesar, had recog-
nised an immense fact — had taken a de-
cided upward step on its long spiral ascent.
I

Forerunners

The world took no interest in this achieve-
ment, for it was enacted in silence and lone-
liness ; belonged, indeed, to a following gen-
eration. Nevertheless, for the first time the
idea dawned that man was essentially one —
that the world was a unit, not a disinte-
grated mass fortuitously held together by
chance. To Caesar, still wrapped in the gar-
ments of his age rf it* was <t .unity to be held

by force, to. be. commanded ;and .possessed;

• • • . • ••••*•

but the ideashAijcomp £nd;\£©jul4*pass away

no more..J2UJk£it In a bloody %n& desperate
way, yet vitally, humanity knfcyfr itsel-f as
potentially a* whole.

Wlje#. # Apthur founded his RouadL.Tjble
the efejnai forward sweep marketU it§ flood
again.* •Jbrough the long and crijsl -years it
had growi* ^adily. Christ hatf^pme and
told the secrets .of tie soul in.tocu*dsr so sim-
pie, yet so comprehensive, •that "after cen-
turies we scarcely begin* to \inderstand them.
But He spoke to the farthest future as
well as to His present, for He was the Ex-
pressor of Eternity, not of Time. Arthur
simply indicates how far toward that di-
viner future the human spirit had, in his

Forerunners

• day, climbed. In him man saw that lie was
one not because of selfish force, but by vir-
"•■ tue of nobility, faith and love. Not terror
of another, but love for that other was the
real bond. Many years must pass before
this truth could find a place in all but a few
hearts. It was, however, incarnate, and
might not perish. Centuries of darkness
followed. Yet ever, here and there, king
or captain, priest or poet, uttered a shining
prophecy, hailed the light that continued to
dawn. St. Francis sings its sweet and
steady rise in his canticles of love. To him
the fact of an overpowering unity was per-
ceptible in everything — in the flower, in the
cloud, in life, in death itself.

It is not to every generation that these
forerunners are granted, but they stand as
guideposts at those cross-roads where man's
destiny hesitates, or seems to hesitate. This
advancing spirit seizes on the man it needs
with a suddenness, a passion, almost terri-
fying. It uses him for that purpose, and he
does little else than fulfil that purpose.
Happiness and peace are not usually his.
Thus it takes hold of Lincoln's great heart
3

Forerunners

and lofty mind, shining from those deep
eyes, so tragic with their mortal burden, so
burning with their immortal vision. Such
men may not always be able to explain them-
selves, may not, indeed, see what it is they
are. But they do see by a light that is to
come and answer to voices which others
will not hear for many years. It is by them
that we must measure the rise of humanity,
and we have only to contrast Caesar with
Lincoln to perceive many things. Page by
page the mysterious book we read opens.
Some of us make out only a word or two,
some spell no more than a few letters, and
to such it is meaningless enough. But there
are others who begin to catch its drift and
to guess, no matter how blindly, at its mighty
message. While a few there are who have
already turned to the next chapter and are
studying those strange new words which
the coming generation will speak in famil-
iar talk and teach as an A, B, C to their
children.

.. Earlier days needed their battle leaders

and the battle cry to awaken, to incite them.

Humanity must be hewn and pounded

Forerunners

together with sword and battleaxe. Nowa-
days it is no longer so. We may still walk
the path of blood, but it is no longer our
normal nor our direct way. Against whom,
indeed, should we fight? What Caesar saw
in antithesis and Lincoln with wise love
we are all coming to see. We can fight
only ourself, and the sword we sheath in
another is driven into our own bosom.
Both in our good and in our evil we are
one, and what we break down, only we can
rebuild. Nor would there be a thief nor a
murderer in the world were it not that he
has in the soul of the most innocent among
us a secret abiding place. You may im-
prison or kill him; but not until you root
him utterly out of that fastness within your-
self will he cease to be. Nor would it be
possible for the wisest and the noblest to
exist unless the lowest of all held within
himself the germs of that nobility and wis-
dom. We are all one man, and the seeming
stranger is no other than the visible expres-
sion of the height or depth of that one soul,
of which each of us is at once the most
infinitesimal part, and the sum.
5

Forerunners

In reading Maurice Maeterlinck we are
inevitably conscious of being in the com-
pany of ideas and realisations which are
thus on the edge of the next cycle of hu-
man experience. There are mists about us,
and the ground is doubtful under our feet.
Our veins thrill with the subtile excitement
of discoverers as we take uncertainly the
steps which our children's children will
tread so easily and firmly. That spir-
itual advance which the race is making finds
in this writer a chance to indicate along
what line its van is moving. The coming
order is quick in him, and when he speaks
the words it gives him to speak he tells
us the truth; if he strives to explain or to
annotate he is lost. But he is himself con-
scious of this and does not often attempt it

" A time will come, perhaps — and many
things there are that herald its approach —
a time will come, perhaps, when our souls
will know each other without the interme-
diary of the senses. Certain it is that there
passes not a day but the soul adds to its
ever-widening domain. It is very much
nearer our visible self, and takes a far
6

Forerunners

greater part in all our actions than was the
case two or three centuries ago."

Man's control over matter has achieved,
as he who runs knows, a wonderful power
during the past few decades. That which is
under control ceases to exist; that is, its
force ceases as an antagonistic objective
thing. For many of the acts of life time
and space have vanished. Nature is neither
the titan nor the tyrant of earlier days.
With our spiritual development her power
slips away. Before long this weight of mat-
ter, these natural laws that crushed and
hampered us at every turn, will have disap-
peared — noiseless and unobtrusive as a per-
fect servant, unseen and unheard they will
do our work for us. And then? It is an
interesting speculation.

Is it not true that the most difficult thing
we can attempt is to reveal ourself to
another? We have veiled ourselves in
words, we have clothed ourselves in signs,
we have shrunk behind dummies fantastic-
ally unlike ourselves. Who does not know
loneliness of soul, and who is there that has
not said to himself, when this isolation
7

Forerunners

presses very close, " I am alone. I have no
language but my own, which none other
understands and which I may teach to
none"? Is this isolation to pass away?

"It is idle to think that by means of
words any real communication can ever
pass from one man to another."

Is our growing mastery of the outside
world a symbol of what we are to accom-
plish with ourselves? Is our brother to be
indeed our brother and not the stranger who
has so long met our unrevealing gaze with
; a look as unfathomable ?

"Is it thoroughly clear to you that if
there be evil in your heart your mere pres-
ence will probably proclaim it to-day a hun-
dred times more clearly than would have
been the case two or three centuries ago?
. . . though you assume the look of a
saint, a hero, or a martyr, the eye of the
passing child will not greet you with the
same unapproachable smile if there lurk
within you an evil thought, an injustice, or
a brother's tears. One hundred years ago
the soul of that child would perhaps have
passed unheeding by the side of yours."
8

Forerunners

Be still, says the psalm, and know that I
am God. Be still, and in that stillness you
will at last hear the only voice that is eter-
nal and universal. Life accomplishes itself
within and not without. The lover who kills
his mistress or the husband who avenges
his "honour" is not experiencing the real
emotions of life. It is not in outside act or
frantic gesture that life abides, but in the
deep and secret regions of the soul . . .
it is in the moment that precedes or follows
a kiss that soul meets soul.

Maeterlinck is full of intimations, of
prophecies. It is of something impending
that he speaks ... "I will not linger
on this subject, for the time has not come
for the discussion of these things," he says,
almost as though oppressed by the sense of
the unarrivedness of what he is trying to
express. He speaks, as it were, a wisdom
not his own, and it is not what he tells us,
still less such conclusions as he occasionally
draws, that makes the value of his work.
It is, rather, the unconscious movements of
his mind and heart that we feel through
his beautiful words and phrases. These

Forerunners

movements, these perceptions and intuitions,
are new. There are no words yet into
which they may crystallise or forms by
which we may handle them. But to our
own prophetic souls they make a deep ap-
peal, and we are conscious of them in some
subtle unnamed manner, a manner that is in
itself a proof of the truth of what Maeter-
linck is experiencing. In his "Life of the
Bee " he draws with infinite detail every
least incident and amazing fact. The ob-
servation, patience, and love in this book
are enough in themselves to fill us with ad-
miration. But it is not alone the life of the
bee that we read as we turn the pages : it is
much more than that. Together with the
writer we have entered a new place. Look-
ing with him through the glass that covers
and reveals the mystery of the hive, we
watch, as it were, the spiritual activity of
the world itself, and hear through the hum
of the swarm the undertone of a mighty ex
planation. It is doubtless the fact witl
every writer that the most valuable part o
his message is that which he is unable tc
give. We get the shadow, not the sunlight

Forerunners

of his thought. But with Maeterlinck we
perceive through this shadow the glow of
a new light. He approaches us from a new
point, along trails hitherto unblazed, and
with a sincerity that does not hesitate be-
fore the possibility of making mistakes.
Mistakes will always be rectified by some
one or other, and it is only the small and
self-conscious soul that dreads, in the
search after truth, to risk being made a fool
of. Physical facts often adumbrate a spir-
itual truth which is their exact opposite.
Under the broken and haphazard inequali-
ties that go to the making of the material
stratum of our life there subsists a vast
union. The very differences that have made
this union appear impossible are the signs
of its existence. For union is only possible
where there is difference; that is to say, a
union from which life may proceed. So
we are at last realising that the apparent
difference between men is but the indication
of their essential oneness. Jumbled up like
a puzzle map into an inchoate and futile
mass, the parts of which will not fit into
each other, they seem fatally in each other's
II

Forerunners

way. But behind this disintegrated heap is
an idea, a plan. And it is this which Mae-
terlinck perceives exerting itself, moving,
arranging. To his perception this drift,
this development, will result in teaching
man, not perhaps to think more clearly, but
to love more deeply. The next generation
—or it may be farther along — is one that
will love first of all. To thoroughly under-
stand is to begin to love. But there is a
deeper understanding than any the mind is
capable of, an understanding that is begin-
ning to realise itself, and it is this under-
standing that speaks through Maeterlinck.
He is, as it were, in a tiny boat on the crest
of an incoming wave, whose impetus he
feels, whose wonder he • endeavors to de-
scribe, but whose depth and power he can-
not gauge. We watch him tossing at this
unfamiliar height, and marvel somewhat.
The fluid that upbears him is too transpar-
ent for us to be quite sure of its existence.
Still, there he is, and there must, we think,
be a reason for it

We should not expect to find, in a writer
of this habit, a concise or even a logical ex-
12

Forerunners

pression of his conception of life. That is
not what he gives or can give us. He is
one of the forerunners, and belongs with
the children of a generation we shall not
live to see. They will know what he only
guesses, they will explain what he can only,
feel. But unless the forerunners come to
take the first vague steps into the future,
no steps will be taken and the race must
halt. The soul is putting forth new powers,
is at last bursting the heavy swaddling
clothes in which it has been wrapped. It
behooves us to observe and to assist.

"The bees know not whether they will
eat the honey they harvest, as we know not
who it is shall reap the product of the cere-
bral substance we shall have formed, or the
intelligent fluid that issues therefrom and
spreads over the universe, perishing when
our life ceases or persisting after our death.
As they go from flower to flower collecting
more honey than themselves or their off-
spring can need, let us go from reality to
reality seeking food for the incomprehen-
sible flame, and thus, certain of having ful-
filled our organic duty, preparing ourselves

Forerunners

for whatever may befall. Let us nourish
this flame on our feelings and passions, on
all that we see and think, that we hear and
touch, on its own essence ... a time
will come when all things will turn so nat-
urally to good in a spirit that has given
itself to the loyal desire of this simple hu-
man duty, that the very suspicion of the
possible aimlessness of its exhausting effort
will only render the duty the clearer, will
only add more purity, power, disinterested-
ness and freedom to the ardour with which
it still seeks."

Sometimes, looking deep into the eyes
of a child, you are conscious of meeting a
glance full of wisdom. The child has known
nothing yet but love and beauty — all this
piled-up world knowledge you have ac-
quired is unguessed at by him. And yet
you meet this wonderful look, that tells you
in a moment more than all the years of ex-
perience have seemed to teach. Something
within yourself responds and understands.
For within you, too, is this deep wisdom
of love that has never known evil, that lies
buried under what has been your life. If

Forerunners

you have really lived you have also acquired
another wisdom, the wisdom that experience
brings. Most of us draw only on this later
wisdom to meet the exigencies of life or to
develop the possibilities of our own souls.
Maeterlinck's message seems to say that
this sleeping princess within us is the real
queen of our spirit. We must somehow
find her again; and with the kiss of that
meeting a whole world that now seems
dead will waken to life, and many things
will be possible to us. We need the wisdom
that is gained through loss and sorrow and
evil; but we need, too, that pure and won-
derful wisdom that transcends any knowl-
edge, that comes from a source we are not
aware of. Nor can we read this writer
without feeling that he has found a way
into the enchanted forest, and that the prin-
cess already smiles in her sleep.

THE ARRIVAL OF WOMAN

WE all know since childhood that if we
see a white horse and make a wish
before thinking of his tail, the wish is sure
to come true. The difficulty is no greater
than to see anything at all nowadays and
make a wish before thinking of woman in
connection with it. Time was when you
might peacefully survey the industries and
professions of the world, nor be disturbed
by the least thought of her — those times are
past, probably forever. Think of it: here
she is, explaining herself, writing about her-
self. That fact alone is singularly signifi-
cant. For ages men have explained her,
discussed her, placed her. They argued
deeply over the reason why she should have
only twenty-eight teeth, while man had
thirty-two. Several valuable conclusions
had been arrived at and more were nebu-
larlv imminent, when some mathematically
16

The Arrival of Woman

Aspired soul, counting her teeth, found she
had the same number with himself. Per-
haps momentarily dashed, man nevertheless
'Went on with his work — discovering, ana-
lysing, computing woman, and telling us
everything we know about her — or at least
«ill we knew until, recently, she began ex-
plaining herself. She had made a few ef-
forts to do so before, but the kindly laughter
of man on these occasions is still ringing
down the years.

One of woman's first discoveries on her
own hook was that she was a human being:
neither fiend nor angel, chattel nor toy, but
a human being. This discovery was so sim-
ple and so true that it is even now very
largely doubted. We can many of us put up
with a good deal, but to ask us to believe
that a woman has about the same struggle
with the world, with her passion! and ideals,
as man, is too much.

Back in prehistoric times a small idea be-
gan to revolve around the world, increasing
through the Middle Ages and pre-modern
times until it bulked as huge as the sun in
heaven. This original tiny idea was based

The Arrival of Woman

on the fact that man is physically stronger
than woman. Perfectly true, even to this
day, but illustrative of the harm a fact can
work. For if to every argument which is
brought up you oppose one and the same
absolutely true statement, you bewilder
people so much that they fail to perceive
that the statement, however true, is irrel-
evant.

From time to time, as the idea rolled on,
involving all other ideas on women in its
circumference, some woman or some group
of women endeavoured to hold it back, to
dissipate it. Sappho and her circle of ra-
diant pupils made their effort; in Rome
again its course was stopped for a while ; in
the Renaissance and during the French
Revolution it ceased to increase; it hung
suspended and motionless. But not before
the nineteenth century was well-grown and
lusty did that huge, heterogeneous mass of
false conceptions and conventions wabble
over the edge of the earth and vanish into
space. A number of dismayed persons
grabbed handfuls out of its disintegrating
sides as it heaved itself off, and these hand-
iS

The Arrival of Woman

Ms they toss excitedly into the air before
the amused eyes of the rest, who feel some-
what as though they were watching the
sleight-of-hand performances at Barnum's.
These small agitated balls have various
high-sounding names — Feminine Propriety,
Woman's Sphere, Homemaker, Privileges
vs. Rights. There are plenty of them, and
some of them are very attractive. For the
angel-fiend-chattel-toy notion had its lovely
appurtenances, its magic glitter. Every
wrong, however intolerable, has its amelio-
rations. Slavery was not without beauty,
though it warped both master and slave.
The Feudal system developed not a few
fine traits, and much moonlit romance van-
ished when it ended. So the subjection of
woman had its exquisite side. Chivalry
was born because of it, and man's soul is a
bigger and finer soul because Chivalry had
its part in building it. The delicacy, the
refinement, of woman herself is largely
owing to it. It lasted long enough to press,
both man and woman into a certain form.
What is harmful or absurd in it will pass;
we must see to it that its good endures

/rtie Arrival of Woman

The other day, between the acts of "A
Doll's House/' with Nora interpreted by the
great Russian, Alia Nazimova, I listened to
the talk of two young women behind me.

"Isn't she a darling?"

"Yes; but I suppose she's going to get
caught on account of those stories."

"What stories?"

" Why, you know she lies about the maca-
roons — and about that awful man who comes
in — and then the money "

"Oh, well! — if you want to call those
lies. I'd like to know what else she could
do? Think what a life that husband of hers
would lead her if she didn't fool him —
why, that sort of creature'd be unbearable
unless you managed him! I only hope
could be as bright about it myself! Non
sense, that isn't lying; it's just being clevei
You've simply got to get ahead of that soi
of man or where would you be? "

There is the child type, the subject typ<
having no definite ideas as to right an
wrong in themselves or as factors in th
formation of character, but very strong pei
ceptions as to how to adjust itself to th
20

The Arrival of Woman

personal vagaries of whoever^ comes most
in friction with it*- It^creates an unreal
world to live in, and becomes unreal itself
to fit that world. Nora is a symbol of mod-
ern woman dropping her false views, her
hypocrisy, her screens and shaded lights, to
face the sunshine and dark of the real world,
learning not through man, but with man,
what life is. Nora's husband sinks down in
iespair as she leaves him; but her depar-
ure is only apparent. In reality she is # for
he first time approaching him. She is be-
ginning to speak his language, she is listen-
ng, not to what he tells her about life —
hat is finished — but to what he himself
iears about life.

All this cannot mean that men and women
ire the same. They are of course im-
nensely different. But the world in which
hey live is the same, calculated as well for
he one as the other; surely to be improved
y the joint and wise efforts of both. The
uccessful activities of mankind are based on
ccurate knowledge and draw from love and
irisdom. Woman brings more of the emo-
ional, man more of the intellectual mate-
21

The Arrival of Woman

rial to the cosmos. Woman, if she is what
she may be, experiences existence more di-
rectly than man. What he achieves by way
of the understanding she often already pos-
sesses through feeling. What is called her
unaccountability, subtlety, mystery, are
proofs of this. She is more elemental and
therefore less explainable. A man will rea-
son a thing out or be reasoned out of it
A woman is simply conscious of it, and
being conscious, cannot be reasoned out of
it. This consciousness of hers must neces-
sarily be guided by reason; but it has a
value of its own, and may not inaptly in-
spire its guide. The strange intuitions and
immense convictions of the heart are as
necessary as the marvellous calculations or
wide philosophy of the mind in the sum of
life. The two amalgamate as do light and
heat in the sun, distinct yet homogeneous,
only perfect in conjunction, neither of them
greater than the other, and each enhancing
the other.

It seems probable that woman's mental
body, like her physical one, is complemen-
tary to and harmonious with man's, w
22

The Arrival of Woman

identical with it. She can perhaps write a
book or make a statue or picture as great as
his, but it won't be the same kind of book
or work of art as that which comes from
him. When it is that, it is merely imitative
and smaller — it isn't genuine. Doubtless
there is a touch of man in every woman,
even as most men have something of their
mother in them. But it's the woman in
woman that concerns us ; there's more of it,
and it is what makes her her. Yet a num-
ber of advanced women seem to resent the
fact that they are and must remain femi-
nine. Indeed, they come perilously near
proving that they aren't and won't. But
though the flood of their talk sweeps away
•many uncomfortable truths bobbing near
them, it ends by rising so high that they
themselves are engulfed. There is some-
thing wrong with the woman who looks on
man as her enemy. A great many of him
is horribly mistaken about her, but he is
getting over that; and he has often proved
her best friend. He may be rough with us
in the Subway and sarcastic in the reviews,
but meet him face to face, and he will roar
23

The Arrival of Woman

you as gently as any sucking dove. Thou
he claims a sixth sense, that of humo
over us, and has an ineradicable conv
tion that no woman can understand a I
game, he really likes us — but he undou
edly prefers us as women. And why shot
we wish to be men? When we think hi
he, with all his advantages, sometimes fa
short, it seems a hopeless task for us
assume.

"Nature," says Dr. Johnson, "ga
woman so much power that it is fortun;
the law gives her so little." Passionate i
the arguments for and against Woman St
frage, but it is difficult to see what beari
on our mental or moral development t
thing has. We are at perfect liberty
broaden ourselves in any direction ^
choose ; to make money in business, the pi
fessions, or the arts, to have our clubs,
run our motors, even to speak at the di
ners where the radicals, the advance-gua
of to-morrow, struggle with pale, cold fo
and hot, scarlet words. Man has a rig
to do some of the work of the world unaid
and undisturbed. He can't bear our ch
*4

The Arrival of Woman

dren for us, and it seems only fair that he
should be allowed to stuff the ballot-box,
since he feels that way about it In New
Zealand the women do vote, Maoris and all,
and New Zealand is a Halcyon isle, as we
all know. But its halcyonness is not due to
the woman's vote ; it preceded that consum-
mation. When our Government becomes
halcyon, very likely we also shall go to the
polls. As long as women have to be hys-
terical or sharp-voiced about it, it doesn't
seem worth while. We have reached the
point where if all the women wanted the
suffrage they would have it. Most of them
don't; and those who do are the very ones
who should be best satisfied with the will of
the majority.

If Romance is not to perish from this
earth — and who that has ever seen even
the least flutter of his rainbow wings could
bear to think of such a possibility? — surely
then it behooves woman to remain femi-
nine. Let her cherish the finer and nobler
elements of her character, let her mind be-
come as broad and as logical as may be, let
her know what is real and what worthless,
25

The Arrival of Woman

and be frank as high noon about herse
But let her, finally, sum up into woma
even as she desires her comrade on tl:
earth to be, at the last account, man. If
woman is masculine, you can call her fore
ful, brilliant, broad, or many other glitte
ing, admiratory things. In the end it pr
duces somewhat the same feeling as if yc
had named her amiable and said she had
good heart; one is simply conscious that tl
business in hand is to be as agreeable i
possible, and that truth is to courtesy \
customs do to kings. The unsexed woma
still labours under the curse of our sex, uj
reality. It is our besetting sin, probably t'
legitimate heritage of a long train of ever
of handicaps, of makeshifts. The time
come to put an end to it, and to accomp 1
this we must bring out all the reserves
courage, energy, and sincerity we maj
possessed of. A woman might, to be ?
retort that she is not the only exponei
this sin. Witness the mass of shilly-
lying literature produced by men as w
by women, the lack of enthusiasm ir
fronting disagreeable truths, the ter
26

The Arrival of Woman

to pretend that the wish is the fact But
she is, after all, at the bottom of this. Men
probably speak the truth to themselves,
although they have got largely out of the
habit of speaking it to her. Our tendency
to pretend that we live in an unreal and
supposedly pleasanter world, thereby shirk-
ing responsibilities which a more valid at-
titude would give us, is not unlikely handed
down to our sons as well as to our daugh-
ters. The former have had it knocked out
of them more than the latter because, until
recently, they alone were forced to face
realities. But some of it stuck, even with
them.

To live within a plaster cast, however
graceful its stride or comely its exterior, is
neither dignified nor healthful. Better to
smash it and stagger out with whatever
lack of balance and odd contortions may
supervene. This woman has accomplished,
and if her first steps were wavering, were
even grotesque, they yet possessed a seri-
ousness, a purpose, that soon carried them
beyond laughter, scorn, or doubt, that is
bringing them to a new earth, perhaps to a
27

The Arrival of Woman

new heaven. There have been remai
women in all ages of history: it rei
for this age to prove that a woman
not be remarkable in order to stand si
side with man. It is her natural place
it will be infinitely more comfortabL
him as well as for her when she shall
finally occupied it.

THE SOUL OF THE CELTIC RACE

THE wild, tender, and poignant ele-
ments that enter into the make-up of
the human heart are written large in the
Celtic race. With them much that seems
lost to the world, so overcrowded with
grim and utilitarian detail, still finds a
fervid life. Dark and mysterious fancies
linger there in hearts that carry to this day
echoes of fairy music, half terrible, half
beautiful. They are, as it were, the last of
the children in a grown-up world, doomed
to perish either by actual death or by
achieved maturity. The haunted wonder of
their dreams shines in eyes darkened by
this approaching fate. For though they are
children, they are also poets, who look be-
fore and after and pine for what is not.
They are few, and they speak a language
whose rules and intonations are scarcely
less known to the rest of the world than are
the spirit and the passions these strange
29

The Soul of the Celtic Race

words clothe. Around their islands is the
everlasting murmur of the sea, and over
their hills the wind forever calls. Some-
thing of these two elements seems inex-
tricably woven in with their lives, and when
they tell us tales or answer our questions
it is more as though we listened to the sigh-
ing of the waves or the tumult of the storm
than to simple human voices. Half hidden
in the mists of their country, they loom
strangely on our sight, seeming greater than
ordinary men, and yet shadowed by vaster
shapes that impose on their lives, crushing
or raising them as may be. They are like
people who have stepped within the fairy
ring and been enchanted. They no longer
belong quite to this world, yet they have
lost the way to another. But the vision
abides with them, and what they say has
virtue. They still keep an altar and a fire,
and when the world is weary of its work-
shops and its ashes it may be glad to turn
to these strange, sad guardians of the sa-
cred flame for a spark whereby to light its
torch once more. Sad they are in their
lonely isles, listening to the burden of the
30

The Soul of the Celtic Race

sea and the wail of the wind, and holding

converse with so much that but for them

has ceased to speak to the children of men.

"It is Destiny," they say, when sorrow or

loss or death or terror befall. Even the tiny

child lisps the words, playing by the shore.

It is Destiny. Something almost visible,

almost tangible, immensely near and real.

Here they are, with their hot hearts and

poet souls, and the stones to sleep upon.

Destiny !

Who can write of such a people? Not
even, it seems, one of themselves. But
some one or something, who was and is not
and never was. A mystery, a riddle, a
bodyless creature, a woman working through
a man's hand, the feminine half of his soul,
awake when he sleeps, a " possession " that
he knew and loved, himself and not him-
self. A name and a voice, but never a form
to look on or a face to know. Such a one
it is who has written story upon story and
poem after poem where are caught the mys-
tery, the spirit, the song of the Celt.

In the two volumes lately issued we have
the romance " Pharais " and a collection of
31

The Soul of the Celtic Race

short stories and impressions. Both
umes have a dedicatory introduction as
quisite as anything which follows,
first is the well-known one to George M
dith. Who will forget that backgroum
land and sea, or the little child sobl
under the weight of the "Gloom," or
old kelp burner? And the author's phr
" The living God, the dying World, and
mysterious Race of Men," weighs on
spirit as one reads the stories. It is
good, perhaps, to read too many of tl
consecutively. It is like entering a h(
beautifully builded, whose casements c
on perilous seas and faerie lands, but wl
is haunted. Old, unhappy, far-off thouj
disturb you, an unexplainable sorrow f
your heart. Wrong and injustice have t
enacted here, the very beauty itself is t
of suffering. But this feeling fades a
you have laid the book by and dreamed
it a while. For there remains, stror
than the gloom which filled the baby's t
with the tears of her race, an enthusia
a vivid rapture, a worship for what is
and rare and elemental, for that pure po<
3*

The Soul of the Celtic Race

of life than which nothing, it may be, is
more inspiring. The Sin Eater, dying
lashed to his cross in the turmoil of waves.
The beautiful, mad poet-husband sitting be-
side his dead wife and smiling into the eyes
of his own approaching death. The lovers
burning in their enchanted sleep— we see
them all with the eyes of Alison Achanna,
that had been anointed with fairy ointment
and " must see all that is hideous and ugly
and dreary and bitter through the glamour
of beauty." This little exquisite story, in-
deed, is it not the key to the whole matter?
"In the places they call slums and among
the smoke of factories and the grime of des-
titution I could see all that other men saw,
only as vanishing shadows. What I saw
was lovely, beautiful with strange glory, and
the faces of men and women were sweet
and pure, and their souls were white."

Is this the secret of the Celt ? Have fairy
fingers reached up through the heather and
touched his eyes, so that he sees further than
we do, sees beauty where we see ugliness,
purity where we are confronted by evil, light
through- the gloom that seems to shroud
33

The Soul of the Celtic Race

him? These stories, though there is m^j
der, tragedy, and loss woven into them, s*-^^
speak, in the sum, the word of nobility, fer-
vour, courage. Books of vision and dream,
Fiona calls them. "Twilight voices are
sweet, if faint and far, and linger lovingly
in the ear." Something within us listens to
such voices with a peculiar delight Some-
thing almost lost or almost come, who
knows? Something, at least, which, never
existent, would leave us poor indeed. For
who shall measure the value of a dream, an
enthusiasm, a conviction? Most of us now-
adays are afraid to believe anything utterly,
to care for anything desperately, to loosen
entirely our grasp of the material. Not so
with these Celts and Gaels. It is easy not
to fear another — 'they do not fear them-
selves. To a hesitant and self-conscious age
they speak a flaming word. Not wittingly
do they speak it, perhaps, nor may we be
quite aware of hearing it. Yet it has its
place in the world's language, along with all
the other strange and various words, nor
could even the most prosaic and cold-hearted
among us be entirely explained without it.

WOMAN IN ALL AGES

TirHENCE that absurd term, "New
W Woman"? It is some years since
Hato affirmed that women should receive
the same training as men, and that the gifts
of nature were equally diffused in both
sexes. " One woman is a philosopher and
one is an enemy to philosophy; one woman
has spirit and another is without spirit. All
the pursuits of men are the pursuits of
women, and in all of them woman is only a
lesser man." It is probable that Aspasia
and others of the Hetaira class in Athens
were responsible for this high opinion.
Women of the widest culture and great
charm, women who thought deeply, spoke
wittily, loved the arts as well as divine phi-
losophy, and in the case of Aspasia, at least,
strove to arouse their sisters to a loftier con-
ception of their destiny, their possibilities,
hoping, perhaps, to prove that a woman
35

Woman in All Ages

could be at once the wife and the compai
ion of a man.

"What strikes one most is a perplexc
and baffled look which the whole face pr<
sents — as of some lifelong anguish resultin
from some contest which no mortal coul
wage successfully — not without a touch c
exquisite sweetness, tenderness, and cha:
ity. Could it be the struggle in behalf <
her sex ? " So speaks Professor Donaldso
of the portrait bust of Aspasia.

We women of this age need desire r
better fortune than to have a chronicler ;
once so gentle and so just — being a woma
I must needs think him just — as the?
women of ancient Greece and Rome ha"\
found in the writer of this book. It has tl
buoyancy and freshness of a spring day,
frank love of beauty, an invincible convi"
tion that the generous and fine is the re;
and important side of human nature. Gr;
cious and lovely forms move through tl
pages. We hear the laughter of your
Nausicaa, the wise words of Aspasia an
Portia ; we see the golden sunshine of Mitj
lene gleam on the heads of Sappho and h<

Woman in All Ages

maidens, those friends, those pupils, the Les-
bian so passionately loved. " I think Sap-
pho was beautiful," says Dr. Donaldson.
Therewith he draws a portrait of her which
should convince the dullest doubter that
beautiful she was in form and spirit, the
exquisite mortal incarnation of her own im-
mortal poems. She, too, loved her sex,
endeavouring to raise it to greater freedom
and understanding — "women in all ages
who have dared to help forward the prog-
ress of their sex have been slandered and
reviled," says our author, in partial refuta-
^1 tion of the host of misrepresentations that
*l have gathered about Sappho's lovely name.
e | "She was no prude. Like the rest of her
: ; ' sex of that day, she thought that it was
i woman's destiny to love, and that the woman
who tried to resist the impulse of the god
tried an impossible feat." But at the same
time, Dr. Donaldson finds no line in her
lyrics directly addressed to any man. The
tales which linked her name with Phaon's,
or with men who had died before she was
born or were born after her death, were the
inventions of the later comic writer; her
37

Woman in All Ages

own people honoured her as no other womar
was honoured in Greece. A passionate-
chaste, tender woman, filled with the arden ^
impulses of art and the pure power of de ^
votion, she stands before us an example w^
might be happy to follow though she passed
through this world so many centuries ago. i

A clear picture of the various ideals in I
regard to women which prevailed through
the Greek, Roman, and early Christian
times, and of how the women measured up
to them, appears in retrospect. In Sparta
the only thing a woman existed for was to
bring forth strong and splendid sons. To
do this she must be herself strong and splen-
did, and nothing that could make her so was
neglected. Her bodily development was
perfect, she was free and simple in her rela-
tions with men, she was chaste, fearless,
proud. Cultivated she was not. Once she
had borne her children she was at liberty to
spend her time as she chose. Their train-
ing was in other hands. Here began the
ruin of Sparta. There was a lot of women
k left after the mother had been accounted

Woman in All Ages

for, and it was this unaccounted for part*
that made mischief in time.

Athens had two classes of free women —
the citizens or wives and the " Hetaira," or
companions. Here a new ideal had come
into being, that of intellectual intercourse
between the sexes, though as yet it was not
conceived possible that one woman could
combine the two occupations of childbearer
and friend. The wife was an isolated, ig-
norant creature, and she grew more and
more hopelessly ineffectual; while the com-
panions, though many among them were
noble women, were yet desperately unpro-
tected and at the mercy of whatever was
low and base in man — "they had to fight
a battle with dreadful odds against them;
they succumbed, but which of us would have
resisted?" So Athens passes.

The Roman matron is next in the spiral
of existence. First, no more than a slave of
her husband, who has over her the power
of life and death, who can divorce her or be
unfaithful to her as he pleases, she having
no redress, no voice. But a Roman was not
39

Woman in All Ages

a Roman, were she but a woman, for noth-
ing. Gradually she emancipated herself,
slowly she rose to a place beside her hus-
band, finally she stands with him, a fit mate
for the master of the world. She might
teach him how to live, she taught him also
how to die. When Paetus hesitated to put
himself to death at the command of the Em-
peror Claudius, his wife Aria plunged a
dagger into her heart, drew it out and of-
fered it to him, with the words, "Paetus,
it does not pain."

The Romans made marriage a free con-
tract between both parties, and Juvenal
says: "If you are not going to love the
woman who has been by a legal agreement
betrothed to you, there seems to be no rea-
son why you should marry her." I don't
see how we could improve on that state-
ment even at this day.

During the glorious years of the Roman
supremacy her women show themselves vir-
tuous, firm, jealous of their freedom and
their dignity; they are loving wives, ade-
quate companions, they manage their house-
holds with tact and propriety, nor were they
40

Woman in All Ages

thought unworthy of advising their hus-
bands on questions of state and government.
In the decadence Professor Donaldson still
finds much to say in their favour ; he adduces
proof to show that whatsoever of good re-
mained was chiefly centred in them, and he
thinks the stories of their depravity have
been greatly exaggerated.

It is popularly supposed that the advent
of Christianity worked a mighty change for
the better in the status of women. Dr.
Donaldson does not agree with this view.
During the first three centuries of the Chris-
tian era he finds her position lower and the
notions regarding her more degraded than
previously. The growing strength of as-
ceticism bore a large part in this result. The
exclusion of women from any participation
in teaching or serving Religion — unless it
were as a martyr in the Roman Colisseum —
worked to the same end. Woman's beauty
came to be regarded as in itself sinful. The
healthy Pagan attitude toward marriage
and child-bearing was anathema to these
newcomers in the world's arena. " Mar-

Woman in All Ages

riage even for the sake of children was a
carnal indulgence, and such thinkers could
not help thinking that the arrangements of
the Creator were not wholly satisfactory.
They did not dare to condemn marriage,
but they held that it was much better not to
marry at all — that the man or woman who
did not marry was a nobler and more ex-
alted being than the man or woman who
did."

This St. Anthony fear of the female sex
could have but one result. A contempt for
women, a misprision of the family arose. A
hectic feeling supervened. Children were a
proof of weak self-indulgence, if not actual
immorality. Woman became, in the words
of Tertullian, "An Eve. The sentence of
God on this sex of yours lives in this age —
the guilt must of necessity live, too. You
are the Devil's gateway; you are the un-
sealer of the forbidden tree; you are the
first deserter of the divine law; you are she
who persuaded him whom the Devil was
not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed
so easily God's image. On account of your
42

Woman in All Ages

desert, that is death, even the Son of Man
had to die."

These are hard words and bespeak a hard
condition. Poor woman had to begin all
over again. Once more the weary path
must be traversed, once more the shackles
must be worn through, once more she must
endeavour to make of her gaoler and master
her helper and friend. Nearly two thou-
sand years have passed and she is well on
her way again. The clear and succinct
portrayal of what the Greek and Roman
accomplished has great interest. They did
not shun the emotions nor functions of
womanhood. They were healthy and beau-
tiful, they bore healthy and beautiful chil-
dren, they filled their minds with the divine
words of philosophy and poetry. It was as
women they excelled, and they left a pattern
behind which is still an inspiration. We
have our own task of fulfilment, and no one
can accomplish it for us, either by act of
Parliament or gallantry. It was an ardent
generosity and love of beauty that made
Sappho and her Grecian sisters what they
43

Woman in All Ages

were. It was her nobility and courage tl
gave the Roman woman her freedom. E
by small means nor narrow hearts are gr
deeds achieved. This is said to be woma
age. May it, two thousand years hen
have as fine a story to tell, and find as sy
pathetic a teller, as this story of long de
women has found in Dr. Donaldson!

WOMEN AND GARDENS

A SSUREDLY there is a unity between
ii these two that has subsisted since
Eve's day ; a tie so intimate and sweet that
should you so much as think of an old-fash-
ionod garden there will arise before the
mind's eye not alone a picture of monthly
roses, foxgloves, mignonette, day-lilies,
sweet william, jolly jump-ups, syringa and
lilac, but also the vision of a fair face in a
sunbonnet, with a hint of smiles in the blue
eyes and a touch of tan on slender hands.
For what then these narrow box-bordered
paths unless it be for her small feet to tread?
Who but she shall understand the true
meaning of these blossoms that smile up
from every bed and crown every shrub?
Does not the rose in her cheek glow in kin-
ship to its fellow on yonder bush, and the
forget-me-not mirror itself in those others of
her eyes ? The lily and she are slender and
45

Women and Gardens

graceful, the trailing vines are inspired with
the same loving tenderness that emanates
from her, the passion flower is not less con-
sciously beautiful.

For we speak of ideal woman no less than
of ideal gardens.

Yet are there gardens to correspond with
every type of woman. Behold those formal
sheets of grass broken here and there by
variously shaped plots of earth in which
stand patterned rows of plants bearing stiff
parti-coloured leaves. No gracious blos-
soms ever grew upon them, no faintest fra-
grance clings to them. Have we not known
such women?

And other gardens there are where weeds
are rank and coarse, where the flagged path
is broken, the roses mildewed, the vines dis-
hevelled and forlorn. Alas! we know her,
too. Small and narrow gardens there are,
where a few rough flowers nod to the breeze
and flaunt a flash of yellow or scarlet in the
face of every passer-by. We have known
her. And then those gardens where the
sweet old perennials have grown discour-
aged, there being no longer love to succour

Women and Gardens

them. They put forth here and there a
timid blossom ; the climbing roses over the
broken-down rustic house scatter a shower
of pale petals, and the valley lilies scarcely
peep through the forest of their leaves,
while the myrtle trails its sad blue flowers
far across the grass-grown paths. Sweet
forsaken garden, lovely still! Do we not,
the fortunate among us, know thy gentle
sister, and, knowing, love her?

I believe various fanciful persons have
at times pictured what sort of a place this
world would be were women to be elimi-
nated from it. But I do not know that any-
one has tried to fancy a world without gar-
dens. No gardens. Vegetables grown in
rows, to be sure, because man must eat.
And deep woods and wild mountains and
the beauty of Nature left to herself. But
never a garden. No walled-in, ivy-grown
space where the flowers stand hand in hand
close together, smiling at the house where
she who loves them dwells. No reach of
lawn edged by tall perennials, shadowy in
the evening light, fragrant under the noon
sun. No paths wandering down marble
47

Women and Gardens

steps and meeting where an old dial has
collected moss through the centuries. No
thickets of rhododendron, rose, and laurel.
No gardens at all, in fact, and if there were
flowers, only such as are grown almost by
machinery for the price of their yield.
{ Practically all children love a garden,
although, being as yet ignorant of death
and decay, they are perhaps prone to de-
stroy what they love by the very ardour of
their devotion. That child is indeed to be
pitied whose eyes do not brighten at sight
of a flower, whose little hands are not eager
to 'work in a bed of his own, more dust
than beauty, it may be, yet holding for him
what not of lovely promise. Is there any
magician in the fairy tales who can accom-
plish anything more wonderful than this
transformation of withered, seeds and brown
earth into green and gold and purple crea-
tures full of perfume and delight?

Indeed, is there anything much more won-
derful performed year by year on this old
earth? Is not this metamorphosing of ugly
and naked spots into sweet-smelling para-
dises one of the best of the many things

4 8

Women and Gardens

which are done by any of us? It would
s eem so. And if he who plants a tree shall
&e called blessed, how about she who makes
a garden?

Making a garden is an unselfish act.
£ven if you surround it by the highest of
krick walls, the ivy will tumble over them,
lowering trees wave triumphing branches
lligher still, and a warble of birds, a breath
Cf fragrance, will meet the passer-by. But
the garden that, while still treasuring sweet
and secret recesses, gives some measure of
loveliness to the world at large, it is this
sort of garden that brings thanks and joy
to each one who sees it, even as its sister
woman makes the world she lives in a
more lovable and joyous place because of
her existence, albeit the full degree of her
exquisiteness be known only to one or two.
Probably each one of us possesses the
ideal of a garden, if not the actual thing.
It may be a deep-remembered glimpse of
some hushed English garden, where the
larkspur grew tall as a man, and the moss-
roses filled the air with perfume. Where
the grass looked like velvet, and the wall-
49

Women and Gardens

flowers were sweeter and richer than
where else. Or it may be a garden in 1^.
statue-haunted, redolent of perfume, o>^
hanging a purple sea, moonlighted, anc^
as love itself and as immortally fair, w>-,
flowers and myth combine to make ei
chanted ground. Perhaps it is no more tha
a half acre beside a cottage where eac
grass blade, each sweet-pea blossom, ha
meant watchful care and love — to each sec
his separate vision.

For me the paths are intricate and swe<
with many flowers. Vines festoon then
selves from tree to tree, shrubs bear bio*
soms manifold. Here ferns are growin
thickly, there a clump of mountain laurel hs
somehow taken root. Everything seems t
have come here by its own volition, to gro 1
because it is the best of all possible place
in which it could grow. It is a garden wit
a soul. And with the handful of quail
posies, you carry away is given a gentl
bunch of old-fashioned love that make
sweet the chambers of the heart long aftc
the forget-me-nots and phlox, the pansic
and canterbury bells, are withered quit

5°

Women and Gardens

away. I see the garden, warm and shadowy
and fragrant in its bleak New England set-
ting, all too rarely. But methinks the tender
influence of the love that keeps it blooming
■will reach as far into the world as I at least
shall ever get, either in space or time.

J ■•

w c

SEX AND SOCIETY

OMAN has been the object of pi
sophical attack ever since she
i| gave birth to a philosopher.

''% A superficial opinion would tend to

; \ idea that women and philosophers 01

I by rights to be the best of friends, s

.;» both are without the hurly-burly of life

i the fiercer conflict of the struggle for

■ istence. Each lives to some extent si

'■'! rate from what is popularly called the

; world. But their enmity — if we may

J ploy so terrible a word in conjunction i

r so gentle a creature as either a womai

!f a philosopher — is, after all, fundament

:f inescapable. At one end of the ma

'} stands She, judging life from her emoti

and at the other He, judging life from
cumulations — of bones or ideas.
Having built up an intricate Palace
•i! Truth from the frozen blocks, hewn ou1

!- 52

Sex and Society

the great reservoir of human knowledge,

what patience can the philosopher possibly

&ave for the little creature who comes

toward him with the cup of her hands filled

With a few escaping drops and chattering

of green grass and bubbling springs ?

• • • • •

The old story tells us that it was woman
>*ho ate first of the tree of the knowledge
of good and evil. It is possible that a slight
tinge of jealousy lingers in Adam's bosom
for that small space of time when she knew
more than he. Or if the story is told to
intimate that it is only through the emo-
tional side of his nature that man learns
anything worth knowing, worth paying the
uttermost price for, still woman may find
more cause for comfort than for those pangs
of shame she has so far suffered on Eve's
account. But have we fallen from our high
estate ?

We are all familiar with the unconscious
humour of the brain that proved to be
smaller than the average female brain after
spending its active existence in proving the
latter's inferiority on the great ground of
53

Sex and Society

its slighter proportions. Since then the
weight of the brain has lost its value as a
proof of wisdom. Professor Thomas, in his
book, " Sex and Society," tells us that the
Chinese brain is apt to be some seventy
grammes heavier than that possessed by
Occidentals, and advances other reasons to
show that it is quality, not size, that counts,
with brains as with oysters. No sooner,
however, does woman draw a comfortable
breath over this happy conclusion than she
finds herself attacked in a new quarter.

Equipped with the same amount of grey
matter as man, we may yet each come out
at very different ends of the horn ; it seems
to be apparent that this is just what we
have done. For it is the use to which we
put our possessions that tells in the game,
or the tragedy, according as you may view
life — and here woman has slipped up; she
hasn't so far used her grey matter suffi-
ciently.

• • • • •

A couple of years or so ago a young Ger-
man brought out a book in which he es-
sayed to prove that woman was not a real
54

Sex and Society

existence, a thing occupying space on its
own account. She was simply the reflex ac-
tion of man; she was because he thought
her. Neither good nor evil because incapa-
ble of an individual act or conception, she
was fit neither for praise nor blame. Possi-
bly because the book opened up an alluring
future utterly free from all responsibility,
possibly for other reasons, edition after edi-
tion was sold. In the meanwhile Herr
Weininger had satisfied right-thinking
minds by going out and shooting himself.
This act, so serious to himself, somehow de-
tracted from the seriousness of his book.

Lately an advance chapter of Professor
Thomas' book was published in The Amer-
ican Journal of Sociology. Woman, accus-
tomed to being struck in one spot, and noting
the title of the chapter, " Mind of Woman
and of the Lower Races," felt the knife turn
again. Once more the old enemy and the
familiar attack. She didn't read the chap-
ter — hadn't she heard it all before? — but
she flung out a defensive hand and uttered
a protesting shriek.

On the whole, she might better have read
55

Sex and Society

it — or, better still, have waited for the book
itself. Professor Thomas is not at all in
the same galere with the defunct German
boy. Among other attributes missing from
the make-up of that precipitate youth, the
professor has a decided twinkle in his eye,
far-seeing as that member undoubtedly is.
When he speaks of a comradeship existing
in happy marriages which is not a true
comradeship of the mind, but rather an ex-
tension of the mother instinct in woman
and an outgrowth on the part of man of that
"nurture and affection which it is in his
nature to give to all pets and all helpless
(and preferably dumb) creatures," we like
the professor all the better, and feel that
here is a real human being who has felt the
stress of life.

. • • • •

Professor Thomas gives us women a fight-
ing chance. He tells us we have the same
weapons as man, only we have allowed them
to rust. We must use the intellect we pos-
sess, measure ourselves against realities,
cease from living walled up in a more or
less spacious cell. Surely no more hopeful

Sex and Society

or inspiring volume on the much-debated
woman question has lately come to hand.
The professor does not hesitate to rap the
buckles of modern existence sharply
enough. He draws a fair picture of the life
a great many among us lead. It is a con-
dition, as he shows, brought about by man
himself. Representing the more restless and
energetic half of humanity, man, sharing
about equally with woman in providing the
working basis of life during the early his-
tory of the race, could ,not but turn his at-
tention, when the necessities for warfare
and hunting disappeared, to those more do-
mestic employments until then monopolised
by woman. Gradually from being helpmate
woman was "reduced by man to a condi-
tion of parasitism, which, in our middle and
so-called higher classes, has profoundly af-
fected her physical, mental, and moral life.
. . . There has in fact been developed
a peculiar code of morals to cover the pecu-
liar case of woman. This may be called a
morality of the person and of the bodily
habits, as contrasted with the commercial
and public morality of man. . , . Mo-
57

Sex and Society

rality, in the most general sense, represent!
the code under which activities are best car-
ried on, and is worked out in the school oi
experience. It is pre-eminently an adult anc
a male system, and men are intelligen*
enough to recognise that neither womei
nor children have passed through thii
school." Speaking of the changeableness
the exacting, unsatisfied, and absurd charac
teristics of some women, Professor Thoma,
says : " There is, therefore, a basis of trutl
in Pope's hard saying, ' Woman has no char
acter at all/ Because their problem is no
to accommodate to the solid realities of th»
world of experience, but to adjust them
selves to the personality of men, it is no
surprising that they should assume proteai
shapes."

It is in this lack of connection with re-
ality that Professor Thomas finds the expla-
nation for the modern, and especially the
American, woman's restlessness, dissatis-
faction, even ill-health. "Human nature
was made for action; and perhaps the most
distressing and disconcerting situation

Sex and Society

which confronts it is to be played on by
stimulations without the ability to function.
. . . The human mind was formed and
fixed once for all in very early times,
through a life of action and emergency,
when the species was fighting, contriving,
and inventing its way up from the sub-
human condition; and the ground patterns
of interest have never been and probably
never will be changed. Consequently all
pursuits are irksome unless they are able,
so to speak, to assume the guise of the
early conflict for life in connection with
which interests and modes of attention
were developed. . . . The gamester,
adventuress, and criminal are not usually
abnormal in a biological sense, but have
failed through defective manipulation of
their attention to get interested in the right
kind of problems."

A practical and normal activity for
women would, the professor thinks, relieve
the strain on the matrimonial situation, " a
situation which is at present abnormal and
nearly impossible." He alone among the
arraigners of our sex maintains that it is

Sex and Society

not lack of power, but a superimposed in-
ability to make use of that power which
imprisons us. Many women will argue that
we are no longer prisoners, and will loudly
point, if the expression may be permitted,
to their own achievements as proof. To be
sure, some of us are no longer in cages ard
may sing what notes we choose or be silent
at our will. But the professor is speaking
of woman in the mass. He says : " Not
only are women unable and unwilling to be
communicated with directly, unconvention-
ally, and truly on many subjects, but men
are unwilling to talk to them. . . .
Even the most serious women of the pres-
ent day stand, in any work they undertake,
in precisely the same relation to man that
the amateur stands in relation to the pro-
fessional in games. They may be desper-
ately interested and may work to the limit
of endurance at times; but, like the ama-
teur, they get into the game late and have
not had a lifetime of practice, or they do
not have the advantage of that pace to be
gained only by competing with players of
the very first rank. No one will contend
60

Sex and Society

that the amateur in billiards has a nervous
organisation less fitted to the game than the
professional's; it is admitted that the differ-
ence lies in the constant practice. . . .
A group of women would make a sorry spec-
tacle in competition with a set of men who
made billiards their lifework. But how sad
a showing a group of philosophers would
make in the same competition."

That puts Professor Thomas' attitude in
the proverbial nutshell. His book is in
sooth a tract for the mental enfranchise-
ment of woman. How far he would go in
this matter of making woman more like
man is not quite apparent. Are their pur-
suits to become identical, their participa-
tion in the rough game of life the same?
Several pages in the earlier part of the book
are taken up in proving conclusively that no
matter what her physical training, woman
is inferior in strength and agility to man;
but that in endurance she surpasses him.
This physical difference must, it seems to
us, shadow a corresponding mental differ-
ence. That we women are not as well-de-
61

Sex and Society

vdoped, as fine, or as efficient as we might
be is beyond doubt. But that we should
look forward to an identical mental effi-
ciency with that possessed by man admits
of much. Professor Thomas in his con-
cluding paragraph admits this. But to the
old argument that child-bearing renders it
impossible for woman to do continuous or
hard work he opposes the statement "that
no work is without interruption, and child-
birth is an incident in the life of normal
woman of no more significance, when viewed
in the aggregate and from the standpoint of
time, than the interruption in the work of
mjen by their in and out door games. The
important point in all work is not to be un-
interrupted, but to begin again."

There is a certain insouciance in the pro-
fessor's attitude here to which woman may
possibly not subscribe.

Citing many curious and interesting cus-
toms relative to the intercourse of the sexes
prevailing among savage and semi-civilised
races, Professor Thomas goes on to say
that "chivalry, chaperonage, and conven-
tions are the persistence of the old race
62

Sex and Society

habit of contempt for women and of their
intellectual sequestration." We should ap-
proach life more simply and directly than
we do, not taking it second-hand from man
as a moving row of shadow-shapes, but
fresh and warm and breathing. The pro-
fessor has a smiling contempt for unneces-
sary conventions and false ideals. He has
a way of sticking his finger through them
and pointing out their distant sources in the
*nisty background of primitive life which
dust jar on their sensibilities.

It might perhaps be maintained that
Woman, in the simple and sometimes terri-
ble reality of her bodily and emotional life,
does come near to what is actual, vital, and
enduring; nearer than man can possibly
come. A confirmation is found for this in
the fine wisdom, the insight, and compre-
hension of many women. For it is not
alone by way of the intellect that wisdom is
achieved. But many among us avoid this
single road to actuality for one or another
reason. We lose ourselves in a crowd of
insignificant and useless things. We are
afraid of life, and our attitude toward it is

Sex and Society

an unhealthy attitude. Professor T
is a sincere and intelligent man, a:
book is a fair and useful addition to 1
erature on the subject. Women had
read it with sympathy rather than hy
it will do us good.

POPE'S LADY MARY

THE extreme difference between the
English and the French attitude
toward women in the eighteenth century,
as well as that taken by the women them-
selves in the two countries, is not one of
the least interesting expressions of that in-
teresting age, and is clearly shown in the
voluminous memoirs and letters of the day.
Letters were an all-important part of life
then, summing up as they did all the news,
scandal, wit, and intrigue. Character and
current events found their clearest portrayal
in the delicate handwriting that covered
sheet sent, strangely and lengthily directed,
to lovers, mistresses, friends, and relatives.
The women of that time were the beauti-
ful, brilliant flowering of the luxury follow-
ing ages of war, which supervened on a
rough form of living still to be found in the
smaller European Courts during the earlier

Pope's Lady Mary

part of the century. The year 1689, which
saw the birth of Lady Mary, had only just
succeeded in putting an end to the vagaries
and life of the eccentric Christina of Swe-
den. Louis the Grand had more than
twenty-five years left in which to flash his
splendour before the eyes of the world; in
Spain Philip's accession in the first year of
the century started the trouble which led
to the war of the Spanish Succession. In
England, William of Orange was soon to be
succeeded by the dull Anne, and then by the
insufferable first George. The only romance
connected with the Court here was supplied
by the Jacobites and their prismatic Prince,
while wit or distinction were utterly foreign
to it. In the glittering French Court woman
played a great part, her wit, her beauty, and
her intelligence finding full scope and ex-
pression, nor was there any bar to her
studying anything she chose to turn her
mind to. She was man's intellectual as well
as emotional comrade. Her tendency was
not toward pedantry, but neither did she
have to pride herself on ignorance. In
England, on the contrary, woman was sup-
66

Pope's Lady Mary

posed to be incapable of thought, and any
hint of learning, or any cloudy notion that
she possessed a brain, was regarded with
strong disfavour — in short, the possession
of a reasoning faculty was a proof that she
was unsexed Lady Mary says, writing on
this topic to the Bishop of Salisbury:

"It is looked upon as in a degree crimi-
nal to improve our reason, or to fancy we
have any . . . and we are forced to
find as many excuses as if it were a thing
altogether criminal not to play the fool in
concert with every other woman of quality
—there is hardly a character in the world
more despicable, or more liable to universal
ridicule, than a learned woman."

Lady Mary, nevertheless, plunged into
the study of the classics and general read-
ing, nor did she hesitate to parade her learn-
ing before the eyes of the men of her ac-
quaintance in spite of the prejudice she
lere inveighs against. Indeed, as " George
Paston " (Miss M. E. Symorfds) tells us,
he best of the joke was that this prejudice
iras purely theoretical. "In actual life, on
he rare occasions that men came into con-

Pope's Lady Mary

tact with a cultivated, intelligent womai
they fell flat at her feet." In France th:
hypocritical attitude seems never to have &
isted. Such women, for instance, as Juli
de TEspinasse, who lived during the laj
part of the century, were the inspiration i
well as the natural outcome of French a<
miration for the woman of esprit and cu
ture. Lady Mary was neither so witty n<
so graceful a woman of the world as man
among her French sisters, but she was n
markable as being one of the very few Enj
lishwomen to triumph over the national tn
tion and show real force of mind. She w;
a fit companion for the men of her tim
men such as Steele, Addison, and Pop
Her letters are already well known to i
through the published volume of her corr
spondence. In this life of her the auth
has drawn largely on these as well as frc
unpublished MSS. and from Lady Marj
own memoir. Letters and extracts of 1<
ters from many other persons form an i
teresting and a large part of the boc
reflecting vividly the life of the day. 4
the personages pass before us they a
68

Pope's Lady Mary

stabbed into life by the sharp pens of Lady
Mary, Lord Hervey, Horace Walpole, Mon-
tague Bacon, and many more. Satires,
lampoons, caricatures, long-winded compli-
ments paint this past world with all the col-
ours of life for us. When the author speaks
herself, she does so with delightful appre-
ciation of the whole business, and links the
mass of manuscript into a coherent and
agreeable book.

We are given in considerable detail the
history of Lady Mary's courtship by the re-
spectable and worthy prig who became her
husband. The course of their love was far
from smooth, and for two years they car-
ried on one of the most remarkable corre-
spondences to end in marriage which has
ever passed between lovers. On the lady's
part there is a prudish terror of any con-
fession of real warmth of feeling — she as-
sures him that her friendship and esteem are
ever his, but warns him against expecting
*ny demonstration of passion. That is not
ler character. " I can esteem, I can be a
xiend, but I don't know whether I can love,
ixpect all that is complaisant and easy,

Pope's Lady Mary

never what is fond in me." Yet t!
through her letters to Wortley a
unselfish and sincere feeling, an
that has to withstand severe discipl
if there ever was a cold and laggj
this is he. He warns her consta
his temper is difficult, that he will
fied only with a devotion which
elude everyone else, for his jealou:
bear to see her as much as looked
another man, and that for his part
welcome an accident which shoul<
her beauty and thus take away tin
tion of the world. He tells her to
" small equipage " if she consent!
him, intimating that it will pro
much better for both of them if she
— asserting that his passion cot
more easily bear her loss than th
finding he was not thoroughly ap
by her. She has also to put up
constant fret of his faultfinding a
ness. Goaded beyond enduranc
Mary is continually taking an etei
well or writing in a mood so far fr<
as the following words express:
70

Pope's Lady" Mary

"My sickness was perhaps more danger-
ous than you think it. I have not lived
long in the world [she is but 21], but long
enough to be weary of it. And in the state
I am in, I am very sorry I have recovered/'

Mr. Wortley Montagu asks his lady's
hand of her father, and is favourably re-
ceived until the two gentlemen fall out over
the question of settlements. Wortley re-
fuses to entail all his possessions in favour
of his first son, while he regards pin money
as a new-fangled notion not to be counte-
nanced by a self-respecting Englishman.
The two spoiled and egotistical men are in-
capable of reaching an understanding, so
poor Lady Mary falls between them, and
very desperate she considers her situation.
Finally Wortley, after backing and filling
for months and covering pages with re-
proaches, explanations, assertions, and
homilies, until one feels that every decent
worm must have turned, and turned again,
in pure shame for Lady Mary, achieves a
postchaise and the lovers are off on a run-
away match. This marriage, so carefully

Pope's Lady Mary

deliberated upon, in which the Tempers and
the Passions and the Faults and the Virtues
of each of the contracting parties have been
so minutely discussed, turns out badly
enough. Lady Mary is soon neglected by
her husband, who leaves her to live in the
country while he betakes himself to Lon-
don, forgetting for the most part even to
write or so much as to inquire after his son.
We get an amusing sketch of Lady Mary's
father-in-law, Sidney Montagu:

A large, rough-looking man with a huge
flapped hat, sitting magisterially in his
elbow-chair swearing boisterously at the
servants. Beside him sat a venerable figure,
meek and mild in aspect, with silver locks
overshadowed by a black velvet cap. This
was his brother, the pious Dean Montagu,
who every now and then fetched a deep
sigh and cast his eyes upward as if silently
beseeching Heaven to pardon the profane
language which he condemned but durst not
reprove.

Lady Mary, forced to give up her hope
72

Pope's Lady Mary

of a quiet home and loving husband, and
sick of solitary confinement in the country,
succeeds in getting back to London, where
she begins her real life. She is in the cen-
tre of the Court and literary circle of her
time, with beauty, wit, and birth to assist
her. She is a shrewd and keen observer,
with a sharp tongue and a love of gossip.
Her letters are filled with news, by which
she invariably means scandal. By a lack
of tact and a fondness for what she terms
plain-speaking, she managed to get into a
good deal of trouble of one sort and
another. She is, indeed, a very human per-
son, thoroughly interested in the haps
and mishaps of those who make up her
world.

Presently her husband is made Ambassa-
dor to the Porte, and she and their son ac-
company him to Constantinople. Here Lady
Mary grows so enamoured of the mode of
life that it is only with the greatest reluc-
tance that she returns home when Wortley
is recalled. Writing to the Abbe Conti, she
says, after praising the Turks and their
scheme of existence :

Pope's Lady Mary

" Considering what short-lived, weak ani-
mals men are, is there any study so ben-
eficial as present pleasure? . . . You
know how I divide the idea of pleasure from
that of vice, and they are only mingled in
the heads of fools. I had rather be a rich
effendi with all his ignorance than Sir Isaac
Newton with all his knowledge."

We can almost hear the famous

" Take the Cash and let the Credit go
Nor heed the Rumble of a distant Drum. ' '

The strength of her character, as well as
the un-English capacity for appreciating the
value of a thing however new, is shown in
her acceptance of the Turkish custom of in-
oculation as a safeguard against the small-
pox, then so terribly, prevalent. Lord
Kingston, her brother, had died of it before
coming of age, and she had had the disease
herself. Its shadow was everywhere. Lady
Mary had her children treated, and brought
the treatment home with her, where, despite
a storm of protest, during which she suf-
fered quite a martyrdom, she finally got the
74

Pope's Lady Mary

practice established, though the Profession
stood out against it till the last.

The story both of her friendship and her
enmity with Pope is eminently charac-
teristic of her day. His absurd affectation
of devotion, the endless silly compliments of
his early, as well as the foul meanness of
his later, actions belong to a world of man-
ners far removed from our own. Lady
Mary by no means kept her dignity under
Pope's lash. She replied in kind, and also
tried to get Lord Peterborough to interfere
in her behalf. He, poor man, was loath to
be mixed up in the affair, but he extracted
a lame apology from the poet, who said he
wondered that his lines could be applied to
any but some noted common woman.

As a contrast to Pope, we have a glimpse
or two of Lord Chesterfield — one where he
is speaking in Parliament — " most exqui-
sitely well . . . everything after him
was dull and heavy, much circumfloribous
stuff being talked on the Court side."

Lady Mary's wit sparkles throughout the
book — as when she says, speaking of vari-

Pope's Lady Mary

ous misalliances contracted by some of the
women of the Court : " Women and priests
never know where they shall eat their
bread/' Answering the old Duchess of
Marlborough's surprise at seeing Mrs. Clay-
ton wearing the diamond earrings she was
known to have accepted as a bribe, she ex-
claims: "How are people to know where
wine is sold if she does not hang out a
sign?"

In her later years Lady Mary goes to
Italy, where presently Horace Walpole en-
ters the arena with letters to London full
of bitter wit and sarcasm. His portrait
shows him a handsome creature, but he out-
does the crooked Pope in scurrility. The
latter, getting wind of his reports, writes to
a mutual friend:

" Neither you delight in telling nor I in
hearing the particulars which acquire such
a reputation; yet I wish you had just told
me, if the character be more avaricious or
amatory, and which passion has got the bet-
ter at last."

Indeed they were a sweet crowd, and Sir
Peter Teazle would have found a pretty

7 6

Pope's Lady Mary

chance to preach, had he been created then.
Nor is a modern touch lacking:

" Matrimony is as much ridiculed by our
young ladies as it used to be by the young
fellows. In short, the appellation of rake
is as genteel in a woman as in a man of
quality . . . you may imagine we mar-
ried women look very silly; we have noth-
ing to excuse ourselves but that it was done
a great while ago and that we were very
young when we did it."

Do we see here the dawning of our
tumultuous marriage question and the birth
of the bachelor girl?

Of Lady Mary's two children, her daugh-
ter married Lord Bute, and seems to have
been a fine woman. Her son was a scamp
and might have broken his mother's heart
had she been possessed of much. She rec-
onciles herself easily to the death of a friend
or relative, is her son's severest critic, dis-
misses her father's death with a philosophi-
cal remark, is entirely composed over her
love affairs. No divine passion flames for
her, no great impulse leads her, no splendid

Pope's Lady Mary

friendship claims her devotion. Doubtless
the smallness of her husband's spirit had its
effect on her own. She interests, she
amuses one, but she never inspires nor
thrills. Life held no illusions for her. In
direct contrast to Madame Recamier, for in-
stance, whose destiny, we have been told,
was to be loved by both men and women,
Lady Mary seems to have attracted more
of dislike, or even hate. Her act in leaving
a guinea to her son was possible only to a
certain type of mind and heart. As she
wrote at twenty — " I do not know whether I
can love" — so she died at seventy-three,
having never answered the question.

PICTURES OF ENGLAND

A MIND open and tolerant, a cool tem-
perament, a singular adaptative
power, a cosmopolitan character, yet one
which feels strongly the home sentiment;
so much one conceives as belonging to Mr.
Hueffer, although he constantly puzzles one.
What is he, whence hails he, what does he
believe? Is he Protestant, Catholic, or Free-
thinker? Is he Englishman or foreigner?
Scientist, poet, painter, aristocrat, or man
of the people? The questions arise, seem
to be answered, prove not to be, give place
to others. It becomes almost a game of
hide-and-seek between reader and writer,
with the writer always behind the other
door or under the wrong bed. In the end
one has to be satisfied with the shadowy
impression given above, plus the feeling
that one would like to know the reality be-
hind this shadow, and the surety that it is
79

Pictures of England

wise, kindly, and worth while. Drawing as
he does from Pre-Raphaelite sources, this
evasive quality is perhaps not to be won-
dered at — it is a true inheritance.

As for the success of his expressed de-
sire to interpret for us the spirit of Eng-
land and her people, that is as it may be.
But he does give a wonderful series of pic-
tures — a vitascope, as it were, of life on the
island, yet not a photographic one ; for each
picture is tinged with the personality of the
author, if it be no other than the desire he
feels that his personality shall not intrude.

London, vast and dim, "London with its
sense of immensity that we must hurry
through to keep unceasing appointments,
with its diffuseness, its gatherings up into
innumerable trade centres, innumerable
class districts," the great hive of a fiercely
individualistic swarm, where each is for
himself and not so much against the other
as practically unaware of that other save as
an object wearing garments and making
sounds such as he himself wears and makes,
we begin with this London, seen through
many different eyes, approached by count-

Pictures of England

less roads, with how many different hopes,
desires, and ambitions. We enter it on
top of a hay waggon before dawn, when
London lies asleep; we come on foot, by
sail, by steam, by rail; we feel that we
make one with a converging world, all en-
tering London, all to be engulfed by the
leviathan, all to move about henceforth in
a smaller or larger portion of the vast coils
and caverns, all carrying around a smaller
or larger picture of "our" London, but
none of us ever knowing London. "The
Londoner bites off from his town a piece
large enough for his own chewing," and
when the thought of London comes to him
when he is away it is this piece that shapes
itself before his eyes. To one it may be " a
brilliant windswept day, with the fountains
like haycocks of prismatic glitter in the
shadow of Nelson's Column, with the pav-
ing stones almost opalescent, with colour
everywhere ... or perhaps the chaotic
crowd, like that of baggage waggons hud-
dled together after a great defeat, blocked
in the narrow ways of the city, an appar-
ently indissoluble muddle of grey wheel
81

Pictures of England

traffic, of hooded carts, of 'buses drawing
out of line, of sticky mud, with a pallid
church wavering into invisibility . . .
of white faces seen through grimy windows
... a horse down ... a sugges-
tion of the seashore in the unconcerned,
tarpaulin-shrouded figure of a policeman
... is this again London? Or do we
see it in the glare of kerosene lamps, the
diffused blaze of shop fronts, the slowly
moving faces revealed for a moment, then,
as it were, washed out, of the serried, mar-
keting crowds. They will be carrying pa-
per parcels, carrying string bags, carrying
unwrapped green stuffs, treading on layers
of handbills . . . standing in shawled
groups around red joints in butchers' shops."
These are a few of the pictures which the
thought of London might evoke in various
individuals — the • Whitechapel ghetto, .two
shrinking figures vanishing into a dark door-
way — the crowded gaiety of Rotten Row —
the swinging doors of a gin palace — the
smell of the Underground — "A ragout of
tidbits— of Gower tombs and Botticellis, of
miles of port wine cellars or the waxen
82

Pictures of England

effigies of distinguished murderers. . . .
Immense without being immediately impres-
sive, tolerant without any permanent prefer-
ences, attracting unceasing specimens of the
best of all earthly things without being sus-
ceptible of any perceptible improvement,
London, perhaps because of its utter lack of
unity, of plan, of the art of feeling, is the
final expression of the present stage . . .
of the modern spirit. It is the world town,
not because of its vastness ; it is vast because
of its assimilative powers, because it de-
stroys all race characteristics insensibly,
and, as it were, anaesthetically." London
is a conglomeration of great organisations
run by men as impersonal as the atoms of
our own frame, noiseless, and, to all ap-
pearances, infallible. London is the great
opportunity — the place where you go to
make -your fortune, to achieVe your fame.
London, that calls "out across all lands
to the spirit of romance, to the spirit of
youth, the spirit of adventure — the finer
spirits . . . because to-day, as always,
the streets of London are paved with gold."
So many of us in our glorious youth

8 3

Pictures of England

believe that we possess the philosopher's
stone — that what we touch shall turn to
gold — "and in London there are so many
things to touch."

Somehow, through the haze of many im-
pressions conveyed, as it were, through
many different persons, we acquire a sort
of notion of the impression London gives
Mr. Hueffer. That of crowded, lonely vast-
ness, full of unexpected bits of beauty and
ugliness, quite unrelated to himself, and
yet observed where others would not ob-
serve. Of a London full of individuals,
each struggling in his own selfish solitude,
hurrying isolated through damp crowds on
rainy days, hurrying isolated through
greater crowds on fair days. Of a London
full of alien people and aims, yet a London
whose smell and sound and spirit he dearly
loves, a London that holds for him the best
the world has to give.

London at work — at leisure — at rest — we
are given sketch after sketch. " What Lon-
don attracts with the mirage of its work
shining across the counties and the coun-
tries, London holds with the glamour of

Pictures of England

its leisure. We never go back, never really
and absolutely. London, for those who
Jiave once, for however short a time, been
Londoners, is always on the cards, is always
just below the horizon. We may ' go back '
for our health's sake, for our children's
health's sake, if we can. We may go back,
n a sense, to the colonies because we are
lot fitted for life or for work in London.
But all the time London is calling . . .
ike the fever of spring that stirs each year
n the blood. It seems to offer romantically,
lot streets paved with gold, but streets filled
vith leisure, streets where we shall saunter,
hings for the eye to rest on in a grey and
glamourous light, books to read, men to be
die with, women to love."
If you have charm, if you have money, if
ou have, perhaps most valuable of all, the
lower of self-effacement, and are a good
Istener, here is the place to come for soci-
ty. A man may believe anything or noth-
ng, think whatever he chooses on any sub-
ect; he may be well or ill born, it doesn't
natter. " In Paris, Berlin, Vienna he must
ave quarterings, a certain tradition, a cer-

Pictures of England

tain habit of mind, a certain inanity, let us
say. In London a man stands pretty well
by what he is, or by what he has. He can-
not of course occupy the throne, but given
temperament or wealth, he can sit in almost
any other chair." The best of manners is
to have no manners. You don't kiss your
hostess's hand or make three or five bows.
You simply ignore her as much as possible.
You are allowed an immense latitude, and
nothing much is asked of you except that
you should allow that same latitude to
others. Your conversation is reduced to a
shibboleth, to remarks on newspaper head-
lines, to the general statement, 'Rotten, I
think/

" If you desire a sight, equally impressive,
of London at leisure, go down Piccadilly to
Hyde Park corner any pleasant summer
day. On the right of you you have all those
clubs with all those lounging, luxuriating
men. On the left there is a stretch of green
park hidden and rendered hideous by re-
cumbent forms. They lie like corpses or
like soldiers in a stealthy attack, a great
multitude of broken men and women, they,
86

Pictures of England

too, eternally at leisure. They lie, soles of
boots to crowns of heads, just out of arm's
reach one from the other for fear of being
rifled by their couch mates. They lie mo-
tionless, dun-coloured, pitiful, and horrible,
bathing in leisure that will never end.
There, indeed, is your London at leisure;
the two ends of the scale offered violently
for inspection, confronting and ignoring
steadily the one the other. For in the mass
the men in the windows never look down,
the men in the park never look up."

But we cannot linger in London forever.
Even the born and bred Londoner must
leave it some time, be it but for the grave.
Leave the women making matchboxes with
a mechanical yet feverish haste at five cents
for the twelve dozen. Leave the 'bus driv-
ers, the river men, the desperate poor, too
busy working for their lives to think or
struggle ; the desperate rich, too busy trying
to keep from being bored to either think or
feel, and all the millions in between. Leave
London and go out into the country that is
even older than London — a country over
whose roads many centuries have travelled.

Pictures of England

"When men travel such a road it is as if
they went amid a crowd of invisible phan-
toms, hearing a continual rustle of inaud-
ible whispers. Here is the spot where a
King drank at the top of the rise. Here is
where the five robbers lay in wait in the
coppice. Here is the milestone on which one
moonlight night there sat the ghost of a
bride the peasant woman saw raise a white
face to hers." The country, " with its ex-
traordinary solidity and solidarity, its ex-
traordinarily close grain of life/* One is
conscious of a distinct impression of scat-
tered, strongly marked, quiet men holding
breathlessly, unshakenly together, in con-
trast with the city dwellers who, thougt
forced into close contact, working at th<
same task, crowded into the same tenement
belonging to the same club, are yet uncon
scious of their neighbours' creed, life, joy
or distress. The one disjointed, apart
lonely, yet knit by the closest bonds; th<
other interdependent as a hive of bees, an<
yet fiercely individualistic — a strange an
tithesis.
This man is no less at home betwea
88

Pictures of England

the hedgerows talking to a tramp, working
with the sowers or the reapers in the fields,
watching beside the dead in a cottage, wan-
dering over pastures with a shepherd, being
all things to all men, here as in town. He
is a continual surprise, and no matter how
often you think you've got him, he slips
away. His personality is, as it were, every-
where; his identity nowhere.

It is, perhaps, this country of England—
and the "country" means only a circum-
scribed portion of the out-of-town; it isn't
the seashore or the Yorkshire moors or the
Broads ; it isn't anything that has a distinc-
tive feature beyond hedgerows and mead-
ows and villages — it is this country that is
essentially England, particularly to Ameri-
cans. London is London, but when we
think of England we want hedgerow and
meadow path, a kissing gate, a thatched row
of cottages. And the men and women who
live in the cottages are not like us.

" I know of no object, no symbol, so ab-
solutely typical of relaxation as the attitude
of one of our field laborers after a hard
day. If you will think of him sitting beside

Pictures of England

his tea table, his head hanging a little, his
legs wide apart as if to balance himself on
a thing so fragile as a cottage chair, his
hands, above all, open, immense, and at rest,
as if, having grasped many and heavy
things, they would never again close upon a
plough handle or a usepole ... a man
whose nights are the walls between concrete
periods of the mere present, whose days are
each one a cell, shut off and unconnected,
having no relation to the day which went
before and none to that which will ensue
after the black oblivion of the coming
night." If you will think of such a man
you will realise that he is as foreign to any
we know here as is the Roman beggar asleep
on the Spanish steps, or the Russian peas-
ant sitting silent and bewildered under the
last blow of Fate.

But in one point, and a significant one,
the two countries resemble each other. No
one who is at all familiar with our New
England farming districts but must have
noticed the almost entire absence there of
the young. And in England — "there are
whole stretches of country where a really
90

Pictures of England

full-witted and alert youth of between 16
and 30 will absolutely not be found . . .
a rough calculation gives only five per cent
of country-born boys who are on the land
of their own free choice. The figure among
girls is even more striking. A girl of mod-
erately good looks or of an intelligence at
all alert is almost unknown in many, many
villages of England."

In the development of the Trust and
the growing desertion of the country for
the town, the two countries are in the same
box. The result of this state of af-
fairs may be one of several things, and Mr.
Hueffer seems to be by no means sure
which is to win out. The latter part of
his work is given up to philosophising on
these and other tendencies, and on the
nature of the English people. It is the
most interesting portion, and, of course,
the one which will arouse controversy;
that is, indeed, Mr. Hueffer's announced
desire. He says what he thinks, not to
impose his thoughts on you, but in order
to get you to express your own. To
him the Englishman is pre-eminently the
91

Pictures of England

Poet among the races. He feels rather tfian
thinks, he creates for himself an ideal and
unreal world, as free as possible from dis-
agreeable ingredients, and puts himself into
the centre of this world. It all depends upon
one's idea of a poet. At any rate, the Eng-
lishman won't have you jarring his world
with untoward allusions to real matters.
The author in his younger days rashly
talked of some sweatshop or other problem
to the fair daughter of his hostess. " Later
on Lady C. took me into the rose garden,
and, prefacing her remarks with 'You are
a good boy, and I like you/ peremptorily
forbade me ever again to talk to Beatrice
about 'things.' It bewildered me at the
time, because, not being to the English man-
ner born, I did not know just what ' things '
were. But nowadays I know very well what
things are; they include, in fact, religious
topics, questions of the relations of the
sexes, the conditions of poverty-stricken
districts — every subject from which one can
digress into anything moving. That, in
fact, is the crux— the Rubicon that one must
never cross."

Pictures of England

"It is a nation," we are told, "ex-
traordinarily tongue-tied and able to repress
its emotions. The special province of the
English nation is to evolve a standard of
manners . . . and in attaining this
standard the Englishman has sacrificed the
arts — which are concerned with the expres-
sion of emotions — and his knowledge of life
—which cannot be attained to by a man that
sees the world as all good."

But there is one thing you can count on
the Englishman as doing. He will, in his
own phrase, "play the game." And that,
after all, is a very fine thing.

With the following anecdote descriptive
of the typical Englishman's attitude to one
at least of the arts, we must end this talk
on a fascinating subject: Mr. Hueffer has
taken his friend to the play, "which was
one of those relatively good but positively
bad pieces of false sentiment that occasion-
ally make a great success in England. It
turned upon the elopement of a married
woman from a husband who was impossibly
bad with a lover who was impossibly good,
and under the chaperonage of an aunt who
93

Pictures of England

was altogether impossible. The chief ac-
tress had one property — a worried look, and
she had nothing else, except of course a cer-
tain bodily charm. She used her worried
look and nothing else on every possible oc-
casion, gazing always into a great distance,
and absently brushing a curl from her fore-
head. This performance grew monotonous
to me, and at about the twenty-fifth ' scene '
I leant back in my chair, and said to my
companion :

" ' She is very bad/

" Still leaning forward, intent, he turned
his head toward me and uttered, irritated,
shocked, and distracted by my callousness:

" ' But think of her temptations.' "

THE PARISH CLERK OF OLD

John Hopkins, parish clerk and undertaker,
sells epitaphs of all sorts and prices. Shaves
neat and plays the bassoon. Teeth drawn and
The Salisbury Journal read gratis every Sun-
day morning at eight. A school for Psalmody
every Thursday evening, when my son, born
blind, will play the fiddle. Specimen epitaph
on my wife:

My wife, ten years, not much to my ease,
But now she is dead in coelo quies.
Great variety to be seen within.
Your humble servant, John Hopkins.

NOWADAYS we have dentists, bar-
bers, trusts, city magistrates, depart-
ment stores, and undertakers striving in
vain to fulfil our needs. Then, one queer
old man in quaint old clothes, with a very
pretty sense of his own dignity, gave you
all the help you needed on this or the other
side of the grave. He made your shoes
and your clothes and sprinkled your house-
95

The Parish Clerk of Old

hold with holy water. He gave your horsi
and your dog physic as well as yourself
and led the choir. He married you an<
buried you and christened your children^
he hunted with the sporting members of hii
town and wrote letters for the unlearned—
He smuggled with smugglers and farmer
with farmers. He outlasted many a changi
of ministers and religion, apparently as sta-
ble as the everlasting hills; and then h(
faded away and is known no more, or hardlj
more, to this generation than are the sho:
and long-tailed coats some of him was wont=
to wear. He was a long-lived old gentle —
man in his day, for we find a large number'
of clerks still active in their duties at eighty
and more. Once a clerk always a clerk,
though here and there an occasional one
is elevated to the ministry. Men of odd
character they were, and manifold are the
stories told of them, the couplets and verses
written on them, the epitaphs inscribed over
them.

Before reluctant memory follows them to
the grave Mr. Ditchfield has collected, in a
substantial and beautifully made volume,

The Parish Clerk of Old

tie greater number of these stories and an-
ecdotes, as well as all available historic data
^nd fascinating old drawings and engrav-
ings depicting the clerk and his surround-
ings from Chaucer's day to the present time,
ior a few modified specimens still endure
in secluded corners. It makes a fascinating
record, brimful of human nature, not by
any means destitute of human feelings, nor
yet of lovely and gentle traits.

The clerk was the first leader of an or-
chestra, and held sway over a motley col-
lection of instruments. Fiddles, flutes,
clarinets, and bassoons, with a bass drum,
accompanied the village choir, and pos-
sessed plenty of power, however deficient
they may have been in melody. "It was
the only part of the service during which
no one could sleep," asserted one clerk, with
pride, and he was undoubtedly correct. Per-
haps this had something to do with bring-
ing in the barrel organ, whose crank the
clerk turned, for none but he understood its
mysterious insides, nor knew how to change
the barrels. Even he was sometimes at
fault and constrained, after an expectant

The Parish Clerk of Old

pause and ardent toil, to shout out, " Dang
it, she Wt speak!"

We see the faint foreshadowing of the
sentiment toward tainted money in the fol-
lowing letter written by Clerk Davy Diggs
to the Squire of his parish:

'Mr. Squir, Sur,

Me and Farmer Field & the rest of the gen-
elmen in vestri sembled Thinks the parson
want parish Relif in shape of a grinstun orgin
betwin survisses — i am to grind him and the
sundy skool kildren is to sing to him wile he
gos out of is sete.

We liv it to yursef wart to giv as we dont
want to limit yur malevolens.

But the grindstone organ itself was pres-
ently superseded by the harmonium, played
by the schoolmistress or some village per-
former, to the consummate scorn of the
clerk, whose impulses toward gallantry were
quite overshadowed by his feeling of lost
importance. Nor was he wrong to be in-
dignant, for here began the departing steps
of his authority, his necessity, his exist-
ence. But much else went first. Sir Wal-
ter Besant tells of one old clerk who, like

The Parish Clerk of Old

many of his brethren, " had seen the ChurcK
of England displaced by the Presbyterians,
the Presbyterians by the Independents, and
toe restoration of the Church. His father,
clerk before him, had seen the worship of
tiie ' old religion ' in Queen Mary's time."
Another clerk, being asked by a stranger
What his occupation was, replied:

"I hardly know what I be. First Vicar
tie called me 'clerk'; then another came
and he called me 'Virgin'; the last Vicar
said I were a 'Christian/ and now I be
* clerk ' again." Mr. Ditchfield explains that
Virgin was " a slight confusion for verger,
and Christian a corrupt form of sacristan
or sexton."

There were neither fairs nor teas in the
clerk's heyday, but there were church ales,
held in the church house, with the clerk as
host and receiver of whatever was " made."
Here the people congregated to feast and
drink the home-brewed ale, the young folk
dancing and practising bowls and archery
with many a shout of laughter and rough
country jest, while the old looked on in
grave enjoyment. But Puritanism came
99 ^<>^

The Parish Clerk of Old

and frowned these merry gatherings out of
existence. The ballad singer sang profane
songs, the maidens danced with too light a
foot, the ale was strong and some there
were who drank of it too deeply, said the
stern critic — and chilled them to death as
an autumn wind might chill and wither a
host of golden butterflies.
Many quaint figures meet one as one turns
the pages of this book. Here is old John
Scarlett, who had buried two Queens —
Catherine, wife of Henry VIII., and Mary,
Queen of Scots, who must, one would think,
have fallen heavily enough into the bed he
dug for her, so freighted with tragedy as
was her loveliness. Scarlett's portrait is
on the wall of the west transept of Peter-
borough Cathedral, a sturdy and compla-
cent figure, looking out rather grimly, as
though he were estimating how soon you,
who look upon him, would see the same
bed he had prepared for so many others —
two generations, says his epitaph. There
is a skull at his feet and a spade in his hand,
if more were needed. Then here is John
Bennet, who wrote poetry which the lords
IOO

The Parish Clerk of Old

and ladies of his day "rushed to secure."
He made shoes besides, and was of a mod-
est nature withal, for he tells us his only
reason for publishing his verses was "to
enable me to rear an infant offspring, and
to drive all anxious solicitations from the
breast of an amiable wife." Surely a rea-
son to strike the modern poet with singular
force; to fill him, indeed, with amazement
and sorrow for the vanished day. As for
Bennet's shoes, we are left to suppose he
made those for pure love of the art.

The clerk was not one to be overcome by
such a trifle as time, as became one who
served eternity. One of them, of Shrop-
shire blood, announces:

" Last Friday was Good Friday, but we've
forgotten un; so next Friday will be."

Women occasionally performed the du-
ties of parish clerk, although they were
never formally recognised as such. One of
them, Betty Wells, added to her other at-
tainments those pertaining to a witch. Mys-
terious troubles followed whosoever incurred
her displeasure. " And the old woman had
a mighty queer looking eye," say the good}
IOI

The Parish Clerk of Old

folk who remember her, shaking credulous
heads.

Mr. Ditchfield has a most un-American —
nor is it for that reason the less delightful
— manner of telling these tales of queer
folk. He has a serious desire that you
should understand the point, and will go
to great pains, when necessary, to explain
it. This gives to the simple charm of the
book an added flavour. The English is de-
lightful, and moves as easily as did the lives
of these old men ; for somehow most of them
seem to be aged, although they must have
begun young — there is record of one at least
who held the office from the age of ten.
They are lives which could have been led in
England alone. They are racy of the tight
little island, rich with her dialects. In this
book they are retold by an Englishman
quite as English as they are themselves,
albeit he is an Englishman of the great
world-England, and they of single tiny
hamlets, of sleepy cathedral towns, and
green farm villages embowered in rose and
eglantine. Speaking of the men of Holder-
ness and their abounding spirit of economy,
102

The Parish Clerk of Old

which extends even in their speech, for, " so
saving are they," say some, "that the defi-
nite article ' the ' is never used by them in
talk." "But this," says Mr. Ditchfield
gravely, "is a libel; another and a truer
reason may be found for the omission in
their Scandinavian origin."

They were a practical lot, too. A Lon-
don clergyman, having for the first time to
preach to a country congregation, was anx-
ious to find whether the people had under-
stood him. His sermon was on the pos-
sessed persons at Gadara and the destruc-
tion of the herd of swine. He asked his
clerk whether he had understood it, and re-
ceived a doubtful " Yes." " If there's any-
thing I can explain," said the clergyman, " I
shall be only too glad to help you." The
clerk hesitated and scratched the back of
his head, but finally came out with, "Who
paid for them pigs ? "

Most of us have had the experience of
observing the automobile face of a green
horse. But where now is he who remem-
bers the face of a clerk gazing for the first
time at a railway train?
103

The Parish Clerk of Old

" When the first train passed through the
village he was overwhelmed with emotion
at the sight. He fell prostrate on the bank
as though struck by a thunderbolt When
he stood up his brain reeled, he was speech-
less, and stood aghast, unutterable amaze-
ment stamped upon his face. 'How much
longer/ he finally gasped out, ' shall knowl-
edge be allowed to go on increasing?'"

These records are almost as foreign to
our modern life as the tales of Mort d' Ar-
thur. Were we to meet a knight on horse-
back who paused to inquire the where-
ahouts of the Questing Beast, should we be
much more surprised than if we were to see
an old man, sitting below the parson, rise
up and announce, in the assured tones of
authority:

" There aren't going to be no sermon this
eve, for marster be going to the hunting to-
morrow, and so beez I, and must start
away."

It's all incredibly distant and entertain-
ing, a book one likes to keep. Mr. Ditch-
field hopes that the parish clerk may return
to his own. Perhaps he may. But it will
104

The Parish Clerk of Old

not be he, nor yet his son. It will be a busi-
nesslike and up-to-date personage about
whom will cluster no delightful tales. The
last parish clerk has been buried, with the
generations for whom he performed the
same task. His worthy epitaph could be
written only by himself. In default of it
perhaps this one, written in 1740 for one
among his countless company, may suffice;

Alas, poor John

Is dead and gone,
Who often tolled the Bell,

And with a spade

Dug many a grave,
And said Amen as well.

1105

MR. SLICER ON HAPPINESS

IN the last analysis happiness is a condi-
tion rather than a possession, and it is
doubtful if any number of directions can
assist in its attainment. To the man who
sets out on the road after it indications are
apt to be misleading. Asking at the cross-
roads of one who appears to know the lay
of the land, he is told to take the path to
the right, albeit it looks a bit steep and nar-
row, to climb hard and to faint not. Hap-
piness waits on the height there. He climbs
and finally he reaches the indicated peak,
only to find an alien creature staring over
his head into regions he cannot contem-
plate. He may grasp her in his arms, but
she will not slip into his heart, and the
words she speaks in answer to his eager
questions are not the words he wants to
hear. Or it may be he was pointed in
another direction, where the way wound
106

Mr. Slicer on Happiness

trough fair meadows and beside still
streams haunted by the dreams of youthful
poets. "See, there is lovely Happiness/'
says his guide, smiling at a vague appari-
tion which seems to the traveller to be no
more than a fantastic intermingling of light
and shade and mist. " Why, I can pass my
arm through this/' he answers. " She — she
isn't real ! "

Lo here and lo there ! it won't do. Yet,
though we know in our hearts that no one
can tell us where to find our happiness, and
though we marvel at what our friend thinks
is she, we still anxiously ask for directions
and seek for signboards; happiness is so
very important — unless we happen to have
found her, and then we are busy with other
matters; it may indeed be suspected that it
is because we are busy with other matters
that we have found her. As in the old fairy
tales, the only way to reach the golden
palace was to turn your back on it and
set about walking in the opposite direc-
tion.

Someone said to me once that you might
have the philosophy of happiness all worked
107

Mr. Slicer on Happiness

out, know how to order your life, to main-
tain your poise, love what is wise and good
and fair, and yet somehow have lost the
zest. The champagne was without sparkle.
You might walk the world with cheer and
courage and devotion, and everyone who
saw you might feel a thrill of joy and up-
lift. But you wouldn't be happy, and, what
is more, no one would be so deceived as to
say, There goes a happy man.

However, it is a question whether happi-
ness per se is not somewhat overrated. The
development of character, the discovery of
what we are and what we are capable of, is
our essential work. Like the little Japanese
water toys, we are thrown into our environ-
ment in order that we may expand to the
limit of our design. Sorrow and suffering,
sin itself, are our great masters along with
happiness. The greatest works of the world
are not apt to be born of happiness, al-
though they may have about them a divine
breath from the radiant goddess.

" The hand that rounded Peter's Dome,
And groined the aisles of Christian Rome,
Wrought in a sad sincerity. . . ."

108

Mr. Slicer on Happiness

" Tristan und Isolde " is not the creation
of a happy man, nor do Shakespeare's son-
nets speak the joy of the heart Sorrow,
loss, and failure tutored these mighty men,
and the works they left behind them show
perhaps more than did their faces that hap-
piness was not the constant, not the reign-
ing, goddess of their hearts. But something
fine, noble, pure, and shining did dwell with
them, glowing in all they wrought and
drawing our hearts to the heights along
with theirs. Out of the bitter elements of
life they have forged something nobler, more
exquisite, than they could have fashioned
out of the beautiful constituents of happi-
ness alone ; even as the sombre magnificence
of mountains or the wild glory of the sea
touches a note of deeper beauty than does
the smiling verdure of a valley.

Out of the one hundred and seventy pages
of Mr. Slicer's book of directions we gather
that happiness is the supreme duty of life.
That a life lived in a congenial home, filled
with pleasant work, not devoid of play, a life
having opportunity for sacrifice and a de-
votion to duty, a life neither repressed nor
109

Mr. Slicer on Happiness

yet too free, without worry or ill-health to
handicap it, is likely to be a happy life. We
are also told that no one can give us happi-
ness, that happiness comes from within, and
we instinctively remember the story of the
singing beggar on the highway and the
mournful King in his gilded coach. Mr.
Slicer is fond of quoting, and there are
many citations from the poets and others.
He has also the clergyman's fondness for
repetition; it might be argued that repeti-
tion is a useful thing in a world that runs
too fast to heed. But he is neither suffi-
ciently simple nor sufficiently real to tell us
anything vital.

The ministers of the past generation were
a grim and unrelenting group to whom hap-
piness meant the uprooting of all the lovely
flowers of life for the sake of a future quite
unrelated to this bitter training. Nowa-
days our ministers are mainly concerned
with promoting our satisfaction in ourselves
and our environment, in telling us that vir-
tue and unselfishness pay a present dividend
of happiness, that they are on the whole the
best investment— to be noble because you
HO

Mr. Slicer on Happiness

are afraid that you will be burned forever
if you aren't, or to be noble because that is
the way to secure happiness for yourself.
There is a third reason — to be noble be-
cause it is possible that the work God is
doing in the world can be better performed
by Him if He has instruments of fine tem-
per and perfect trustworthiness to work
with. Lincoln was of this last group ; he is
spoken of as having had humour; he is not
spoken of as having been happy. It is doubt-
ful if he ever thought of personal happiness
as an aim, and yet what a mighty influx of
spiritual good flowed into the world because
of him. ' • «•

But Mr. Slicer may very well reply to
my complaint that he has not made me hap-
pier, " Neither have you reviewed my book."

THE NEW HERO

IN the old stories — necessarily the good
old stories — the hero or the villain could
only be assisted or foiled in one or two sim-
ple and timetaking ways. You put your
hero on one of the many desert islands or
unknown continents, and the letter he had
somehow managed to despatch travelled
along month after month to its distant ter-
mination. Then the 'ft&clief pdrtyir^fef out
by sail and caravan to make its weary way
to the by-this-time aged man awaiting them,
clothed in skins and a long beard, with eyes
dimmed from long scanning of the hori-
zon's rim. Or the villain, slipping from the
eager grasp of a hundred pursuers, dashes
down the slope, leaps into a shallop, gains
the brig in the offing, and, making all sail,
strikes a favourite attitude and escapes.
Nothing to be done but get hold of some-
thing with sails and westward-ho in pur-

112

The New Hero

t. Years may pass or a fortunate chance -
Y bring you face to face with him in a

months. But the chances are that if he
$ a few yards the start of you he will
p it for at least several years — it was all
n chase in those days, and no queens
res allowed in the human chess game,
ut now? Well, now we have changed
:hat. To take a concrete instance, where
radays would young Lochinvar have
ed? Fleet steeds to follow, forsooth.
n about the turbine, the motor car?
n would he escape the telegraph or ca-
> Or, granted he had the wit for that,
ild not the wireless noose him in its in-
ble coils? Or suppose it is Japhet
•ching for his father — any of the yellow
rnals will nail the old man for him with
;w extras.

[ow, indeed, is the modern author to
ig a catastrophe down upon the head of
hero or heroine when all the powers of
h and air and light rush to his or her
stance? The world, once so spacious

so lonely, full of caverns, isolated rocks,
liettes and what not of darkness and
113

The New Hero

mystery, has become a little place blazing
with electric lights and overrun with swiftly
moving machines; while you take your
friend's greeting or your enemy's curse
along in your vest pocket, as it were, each
step, or rather swoop, you make. The
struggle between hero and villain nowadays
is not with pistol in either hand and knife
between the teeth, over mountain pass or
across burning sands. It occurs amid the
rattle and clatter of a telegraph booth, or
with a telephone girl as medium. Pursued
too closely, the villain might leap from a
turbine steamer going twenty-three knots
an hour, but he would only plunge into the
arms of Nemesis awaiting him in a subma-
rine under the green wave — and already
the wings of the airship flap about his ears.
In fact, time and space have been elimi-
nated from the modern writer's box of tools.
Simultaneousness characterises the world
at present, and literature must follow suit.
Breathless and forespent, is it any wonder
that the desperate art takes refuge in the
dim, delightful past, draws about it the
soothing folds of undiscovered continent?,

The New Hero

or seeks in despair the haven of a distant
planet? Standing in the spot light of the
present, invention falters. Events are
shouted in vain through the megaphone to
an uninterested crowd who have already
had the news an hour before at their pri-
vate desks. You can't hide anything —
there isn't even such a thing as a really
dark night left you.

Doubtless, however, the worst is still to
come. For if the next generation is to use
telepathy, clairvoyance, and clairaudience
as the customary means of communication,
what will the hapless weaver of plots do
then? No sooner has the villain formu-
lated his plan for robbing the bank than the
.whole town is cognizant of the scheme.
But neither can the villain be trapped, for
he, too, can pluck from out the heart its
rooted secret, and so is forced into a safe
inaction. Thus is Maeterlinck's static
drama the forerunner of actual life. Vil-
lains will be reduced to sitting moveless in
their dens thinking up evil actions, which
are in turn thought down by the virtuous
defenders of the law. All material move-
US

The New Hero

ment may, in fact, cease. The world, with
its tendency to a spiral ascent, will again
become quiet and restful. But, except in a
gross and unusable form, it will never
more be a harbinger of time and space. The
question as to whether literature can con-
tinue without these adjuncts we will leave
to others. Only we would ask, what were
the use of printing a story that, from its
first conscious moment, would be the com-
mon property of everybody?

Without a villain there can be no neces-
sity for hero and heroine. And with these
eliminated, what is the book of the future
to contain? For as to the plot, that ceased
to exist some time ago. The outlook is dark,
and unless authors can combine to make a
corner in psychology, their case seems
hopeless.

116

NAZIMOVA

PASSING along Riverside Drive the
other day, I saw a statue, recently un-
veiled, occupying a situation any artist
would envy, marking the termination of a
wide street and crowning a noble upward
sweep; standing so high, indeed, as to be
backed by sky alone, and facing the broad
and flashing river through a fringe of splen-
did trees. The same afternoon I went to
see Nazimova in "The Master Builder" —
and the two contrasted experiences set me to
thinking.

The statue belongs with the art depart-
ments of the big shops. It belongs with the
mass of insincere art that is so eagerly ac-
cepted by the public; with those ornaments
whose sole distinction is fussiness; with
those statuettes in affected postures that
gather in ghastly groups around tall onyx
lamps; those pictures that exude a sickly
117

Nazimova

sentimentality or odious prettiness ; or even
with the adopted simplicity of the Woman's
Page converts, a simplicity that has learned
to discard bowknots and to prefer a straight
to a curved line : it belongs to what is fake,
in fact.

It is not so much that most people fail to
desire what is noble in their surroundings;
it is the realisation of their absolute passion
for what is false and vulgar that is forced
upon one. You find it everywhere. In lit-
erature, cherishing the "Human Interest"
stories of the daily papers, or fulfilling itself
in the " Society " or " Plain Folk " stories
of the magazines and best sellers; in the
popular music that drowns even thought in
the restaurants; in the glare and the deco-
rative antics of those restaurants and ho-
tels; in the very smile and voice of count-
less men and women you encounter. Most
of all, perhaps, it shows itself on the stage
— both in the plays that run their hundreds
of nights to crowded houses, and in the ac-
tors who interpret them. The essential un-
reality of both is superlative, and what more
is to be said? We all know it; it is every-
118

Nazimova

where, and sometimes we are fain to think
it is everything.

But this is not so. This past summer
there died in America two great sculptors,
Edward Kemeys and Augustus Saint-Gau-
dens. Kemeys' groups of the wild animals
he knew so intimately are characterised by
a truth and directness of bearing never ex-
ceeded by any artist. Here is the wildness,
the unconsciousness, the beauty and revela-
tion of nature speaking through her one
great interpreter, the man of genius. Here
is no straining for effect, only a pure pas-
sion for truth. Silent and withdrawn, liv-
ing for many years on the plains and in the
mountains studying the creatures whose life
he was to re-create into the immortality of
art, the artist passed almost unseen and
unknown through the world, and much time
may elapse before it realises how great was
this guest it entertained so unawares.

With Saint-Gaudens, too, the need of ex-
pressing the truth was paramount. He has
been known to work for months over a
hand, to hold back his work from the foun-
dry to give and give again that last touch
119

Nazimova

that should satisfy him, losing money, for-
feiting the patience of his patrons, caring
only that it be the best he was capable of
that should finally stand for him.

He was better known and better rewarded
than Kemeys, chiefly because his work lay
more with men, and he had many friends,
won by an exquisite and genial personality,
•who forced the world to take notice of his
genius. But it is not the question of reward
that interests one so much as the question
of how great a sincerity and love of art as
an expression of truth subsists among us at
this day.

Rodin remains to hearten us. Rodin, who
is working out his own salvation with the
conviction of one of the great Greeks, going
like them on a path of his own choosing,
making mistakes, it may be, failures even,
but the mistakes and failures of a man
seeking only to grasp the truth, of a
man immersed heart and soul in a mighty
work.

The Greeks had reached the highest pos-
sible expression of their particular concep-
tion—pure material beauty, untouched by
120

Nazimova

human passion or decay. Rodin leaves them
the exquisite perfection of their lofty gods
and goddesses and stares, not at the human
body, but into the strange recesses of the
human soul for his inspiration. Since the
soul has no medium except the body through
which to make itself recognised, he neces-
sarily uses this body — but almost he might
discard it. These men and women of his,
contorted, suffering, enduring, full of the
storm and calm of life, gather them all up
into one tremendous whole and behold the
soul of the race engaged in its tremendous
struggle with the body of the race — it is
the Passion which this sculptor carves, and
under his hand metal and stone are no
more than the thin veil over the love and
despair, the terror and triumph, of the hu-
man heart.

Side by side, then, with an overwhelm-
ing amount of and admiration for what is
false and common, runs a clear and power-
ful current of perhaps unmatchable sincer-
ity and fineness. In music Edward Mac-
Dowell exemplifies this particular tendency,
combining a strong originality with no play-
121

Nazimova

ing to the gallery, no display for the sake o^h
display. In literature, George Moore stan^K

in this same rank, for never have the etei

nal springs of human nature, with thos-«
modifications which the passing generation!
impresses upon them, heen depicted with an
art more marvellously simple, so consum-
mate a knowledge for eliminating the un-
essential, or a deeper devotion to the truth,
be it or not pleasant and conventional.

These artists are real, not similacri of the
vanishing fashion in statue, song, or book
They exist for the sake of telling us, in
whatsoever medium best suits them, the
truth as life has told it to them, with no
care as to how we may like it nor what we
may give them in exchange. And this sin-
cerity of attitude is what Mme. Nazimova
brings to our stage. In her burns the flame
of life, not the sickly reflection of adopted
ideas and second-hand emotions. Here is a
woman, not a consummation of tricks and
dress. Here is an actress, capable of com-
pletely identifying herself with her role, of
becoming in every least particular the
woman whom she is enacting. You feel

122

Nazimova

that she has lived the whole life of her
character up to the moment when she
emerges before your eyes, and under the
spell of her creative genius could as easily
think of another person in the part as you
could think of someone playing your sister
or your friend.

Here is a Hedda with her corroded
soul, her cold passion of vanity, her un-
utterable weariness, so clearly to be read
in those heavy and scornful eyes, in the
languid gestures, the timbre of the voice.
A Hedda whose whole past life you are
aware of from this sum of her personality
living before you, and the dark movements
of whose heart you watch as in some magic
mirror. Then there is Norah, younger than
her own children, shallow as a brown moun-
tain brook before it plunges into the deep
and sombre basin awaiting it, a child whose
body dances to the time her spirit keeps, a
little, generous, loving creature, who has
never stopped for a thought. And Hilda,
the troll girl, the visionary, cruel with the
terrible cruelty of youth, laughing where
she should weep, weeping she knows not
123

Nazimova

why, fierce with an egotism that fancies
itself nobility, an elfin incarnation of fate.
Could there well be three women more dis-
similar? Yet each is given to us with a
wonderful fidelity, an exquisite detail. To
be sure, these parts are allied in one way —
they all spring from the same brain and are
in a certain sense sick women, women sick,
so to say, of intense modernity. It may be
that Alia Nazimova will prove unable to
act parts where a high emotional imagina-
tion is required. It is too soon to say, for
we have not as yet had an opportunity to
gauge her in a character whose interpreta-
tion needs a lofty poetic insight. It is pos-
sible that her scope may prove to be a nar-
row one. Nevertheless her art is extraor-
dinarily natural, singularly full of vitality.
Her body responds to every movement of
her mind, and to see her listening to what
another character is telling her is to see
the emotions which his words contain re-
flected in the subtle beauty of her face, as
the wind darkens or brightens across a field
of grain or the waters of a lake. Perhaps
this actress may never give us a Juliet or a
124

Nazimova

Lady Macbeth; but she will always be
original and veracious. She is the artist
and not the faker, belonging with those who
are not tainted with that passion for lying
that animates so huge a portion of the
world. Into such regions of woman's heart
as she penetrates she will throw a clear
light. And for this we should be deeply
grateful to her. For to see or hear or ex-
perience a real work of art is to acquire
actual life. But we must ourselves be able
to receive the angel when he comes, or we
remain unaware that something noble has
passed our way; its vibrations were too
keen for our cognisance. And this dulling
of our perceptions is the fatal result of much
mediocrity. So that it is a kind of crime
for a city to put up a bad statue or a com-
mon building. A work of genius, contain
ing as it does within it the principle of life,
continually begets itself in the souls of the
people, causing what is finest in itself to
come to birth within them. And so, too,
the vulgar and commercial objects strewn
on every hand spread their illegitimate
brood of low ideals and false standards
125

Nazimova

broadcast over man's mind, until in time
he can no longer perceive nobility nor
understand truth, and in the presence of
real genius he is uneasy or blind

126

FOOTSTEPS

SEATED alone in the dusk of a summer
evening, half-conscious of the familiar
surroundings, half-lost it may be in some
Fanciful dream, who has not remarked the
strange effect of a passing footstep? Sud-
denly the peace and silence are broken by
:his step that comes, lagging or eager, heavy
jr light, but comes steadily, passes, dies, is
^one. Somehow it seems to have crossed
the immaterial pathways of your mind, to
have become, to a strange extent, part of
pour own life. Whence came it, whither
does it tend, and will it be received with
joy or sorrow when it reaches its final
destination ?

Strange footsteps, with no other being, so
far as we may distinguish, save that of
sound. Eloquent with that witchery of the
jnseen, the intangible, which appeals so
strongly to some of our moods. It may be
i man that passes; yet who shall deny that
t might be Fate or Death or Love or Life?
127

Footsteps

Hark, how hurried is this one! What
errand of young hope draws it so swiftly
on? Or is it perhaps hastening from some
committed sin, and does its light fall imply
a sinister incubus? And this that follows,
seeming to lag so heavily ? Does it go com-
panioned by great dreams, and, weighted by
their purple freight, move thus slowly to
their mighty measure? Or has life struck
out the last light that shone for it, and must
it stumble henceforth uncertainly onward
in the grey darkness?

Anon there passes the firm, strong step
of a man, bent apparently on some decisive
errand. We behold him with the mind's
eye, hurrying on to lend his shoulder to the
uplifting of the world, earnest, fine and
simple as a man should be. Yet it is pos-
sible that a brood of broken resolutions, lost
ideals and bitter regrets may accompany
him, trailing their dark wings between his
spirit and the light. Could we by some
powerful attraction draw all these thoughts
that crowd about each passing step to come
and sit here awhile with us in the darkness ;
strangely lightened, the footsteps would
128

Footsteps

go on, leaving behind shapes enough.
Trivial, coarse, mean, many of them. A
few perhaps terrible or tragic. Some among
the throng, however, beautiful and bright.
But these we must hasten to release and
send on to their rightful owners; for the
night is dark and their gentle radiance must
be needed.

Yet methinks that all, even these, would
be touched by some shadow of sadness. For
it is rare for any one thus solitary in the
night, bound whithersoever it may be — to a
happy reunion or a death-watch — not to
catch, however unwittingly, a hint of the
burden of sorrow that the world has heaped
on its shoulders during all the centuries.
Is it the tender reverie of a young girl or
the ambitious dream of a youth that flits
In on us? Even so, we may distinguish a
suggestion of this same sorrow, hardly rec-
ognised as yet, where in the future it may
be but too much at home. Yet should we
rather welcome than repel this omnipresent
shade. For if it dim somewhat the glory
of the children of light, it lends them a
touch of tenderness not to be disdained.
129

Footsteps

And even to the vulgar or cruel among the
others, it gives a gleam of dignity, of
nobility, a kinship with the highest. Sor-
row is sister to us all.

Who is there that has not sat .listening at
some time or times for the footsteps of one
beloved? How many times in the hour the
heart has quickened its beat, thinking to
recognise the one step among all that come
and pass — only to weaken as each passes
and proves false. But what matter, if at
last it come, the right step, and turn in at
the gate, and hasten up the path and is soon
no step, but the very being whom we love,
our light and life !

Yet many there are who never hear the
step pause at their threshold: for whom all
footsteps are alike, moving in measured beat
past and beyond, filling all the roads of the
earth, going hither and thither on a thousand
errands, but coming in at the gate, left so
pathetically open, never at all. To such the
tread of the angel of death must have a
wonderful music and his entrance a glory as
benign as love. He at least is their very own.

130

THE WISDOM OF ANIMALS

IT is axiomatic that one finds that which
one seeks for. We have long been told,
for instance, to search Holy Writ if we
desire to prove anything at all and behold
the confirmatory word or phrase. To the
fool the world is a silly place, to the poet
it is instinct with wonder, beauty, and truth.
Some New England maiden ladies have
written treatises to prove the Indian a
creature all compact of grace and nobility;
while various among the rougher elements
of the West have been known to maintain
that he possessed but one virtue — that,
namely, of remaining dead when killed. As
Stevenson puts it,

" The world is so full of a number of things
I'm sure we should all be as happy as Kings,"

and many as are the things the points of
131

The Wisdom of Animals

view regarding them are infinitely mo:
numerous and quite as enjoyable.

When we were children, and long aftex*
we had ceased being children, we were from
time to time made radiantly happy by the
visits of a man we called Uncle Ned. He
was tall, well formed, light of foot and sure
of eye, with that look that comes of living
in large places and with silent folk. He
was never hurried and never behindhand.
Gentleness, poise, and humour mingled with
the delicacy of a woman and the simplicity
of a child in his make-up, and he was withal
an artist, a great artist with the passion for
beauty and for truth. He modelled animals,
and since his boyhood had lived in the
prairies and mountains of our country, fol-
lowing the trails of the wild creatures, sleep-
ing in the tepees of the Indians, camping
with the trappers and fur hunters from
ocean to ocean. He knew the sign language
of the plains, the shrill war cry and guttural
salutation of the redman, the campfire
stories told over and over again by men who
had known no other life than that of the
132

The Wisdom of Animals

°pen sky. He had watched from his horse
the mighty bison move past in countless
thousands to extinction. He had shot the
grizzly bear and the bighorn. He had that
large patience which belongs perhaps only
to the artist and the man of science, and
hy virtue of which no time is too long which
is spent in studying any detail of their life's
work. He modelled with a vigour and
knowledge never exceeded by any animal
sculptor. It was not the animal on parade
with stately tread and flexed muscles that
occupied his art, but the creature unsus-
picious of observation, relaxed, playful,
savage, unselfconscious, above all inimit-
ably wild. New Yorkers have a specimen
of his work in Central Park, his " Still
Hunt/* a cougar about to spring.

Between us children and this man of
genius with his child heart there subsisted
an intimacy, and many and many an hour
have we sat listening to him whom others
found so silent and so shy. Wonderful
were the stories he told of the wild world
whose tricks and wisdom and marvellous in-
stinct he knew so well, whose beauty he
133

The Wisdom of Animals

admired so intensely. But he never at-
tempted to explain the -animals' acts by
human impulses, nor did he ever plunge into
their psychological interiors.

But what went ye out for to see ? a reed
shaken in the wind or a reed quivering with
its own emotions ? According as that may
be so too is the story with which you return.
This, however, may be said. In the former
instance you have but to describe a tangible
occurrence. In the second, since the reed
does not possess the power, or, at any rate,
the inclination to translate its emotions into
words you are capable of comprehending,
you can only draw on your own emotional
experiences, modifying them in order to suit
your fancy, to explain the emotional experi-
ence you conceive the reed to be undergoing.
You may thus arrive at a close apprehension
of the reed's inner life, but then, quite as
definitely, you may not. And until the reed
concludes to speak up for itself, neither you
nor any one else can be certain that you
have hit the nail on the head.

One trouble with the later school of nature

134

The Wisdom of Animals

books is that they make their animals the
Aeroes of their tales. Now a hero, from
time immemorial, has had to be supplied
with monologues and soliloquies. With the
human hero this is not much of a difficulty,
for we are willing to believe the author
capable of comprehending his intellectual
and emotional processes when he is troubled
iwith either. But we balk a bit when re-
quired to believe an author possessed of the
same powers with regard to a bear, or a
fox, or any other animal. It isn't so much
that we are bothered by the limitations of
the animals ; it's only that we feel the writer
has those of the rest of humanity. Fable,
which clothes human attributes with animal
forms, is, of course, another matter. But it
is this very power which the modern school
does claim. In some cases to the extent of
discovering among the brutes all the moral,
if not religious, perceptions of mankind.

Maeterlinck says, in his "Life of the
Bee," which relates marvels more inspiring
than any of those told by the nature fakers,
that it is scarcely wise to seek to establish
what we think the truth ought to be, how-
135

The Wisdom of Animals

ever interesting and probable this truth ap
pears, by twisting isolated occurrences to f
some theory of our own; that the trutl
capable of verification, based on long ot
serration and close study, is what we shoul
seek, even though this truth may seem lei
wonderful and less inspiring than the thing
we imagine, even though it should swee
away beautiful beliefs and replace them wil
what is ugly or commonplace. For, if it 1
truth, there resides in that simple fact
majesty which none of the splendid fabr
cations of our fancy can ever achieve. Ar
later, in " L'Intelligence des Fleurs," he go<
on to say that, whether what looks like re;
son, calculation, invention, be the work <
Nature herself, or of the bee, the ant, tl
orchid, what is that to us? The thing to <
is to seize the character, quality, habits, pe
haps the final aim, of this general intell
gence that inspires the manifold acts of i:
telligence that fulfil themselves on th
earth. If we mix our foregone conclusior
our explanations and the pleasing gambc
of our fancy with this search, we complica
matters instead of clearing them, putting c

136

The Wisdom of Animals

instead of advancing our comprehension of
the Universe.

To hold the nature school writers, as they
have come to be called, to an ideal as pure
and high as animates such a man as Maeter-
linck, is, of course, to attempt too much.
These writers are telling a story for one or
other of the magazines, to please a certain
public; they are not seeking to establish
outposts on the cold and solemn mountain
peaks of Truth. They have more or less
experience of life in the wild, and many
pretty tales to tell of that life. So be it. It
is only when they claim to be scientific
students, calm commentators on fact, teach-
ers of the real behind the appearance,
setters down of the proven truth alone,
that we grow restive if they seek to impose
their fancies on us as veracity. When we
read that a fox springs traps from an al-
truistic desire to save his kindred from the
pain or inconvenience to which he had him-
self been subjected, or to revenge himself
upon a trapper against whom he entertains
sentiments of rancour, we might be delighted
with the story as a fable; as the pronounce-
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The Wisdom of Animals

ment of a self-announced student of the
truth it annoys us. Probably a fox has been
frequently observed springing traps and re-
maining uncaught; we can afford to take
the word of trappers and woodsmen on that
score. The fox is known to be curious and
investigating, and clever in getting himself
out of trouble; traps have also been known
to spring accidentally. But that a fox
should deliberately spring a trap, or trample
the snow about it from a Christian love of
doing good, is not provable and should not
be told us as a fact, in a book claiming to
be a record of truth regarding the animal
world.

It is the aim of writers of this school
to attribute human motives to animals.
Revenge, meanness, generosity, justice, love,
pity — these are the springs that move the
beasts of the wood and the birds of the air,
even as they move the men and women
about us. To the real lover of the myste-
rious methods of nature, to the patient
searcher of her secrets, this attitude seems
trivial. That there are links and similari-
ties between ourselves and the animals is

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The Wisdom of Animals

true: but there are also differences, no less
amazing and important than the likenesses.

We are told farther on in the story of
this same fox, that the animal, who is flee-
ing before a forest fire, reasons and makes
comparisons precisely as a man might under
the same circumstances. Comparing the
speed of his own flight with that of the
flames behind him, he felt that he would
make the beaver pond in time, though with
nothing to spare. Also he is ready, at
another time, to take great risks in the hope
of doing harm to his pursuers. But there is
no need of multiplying instances. The
point is that a human nature is given to the
animals, and even, among some of the
members of the school, a moral and spiritual
nature.

Now, that animals have shown some
power for reasoning and a tremendous
power of adaptability, with what seems at
times a marvellous memory, is susceptible
of proof, and is intensely interesting, and
we cannot go too far in endeavouring to
establish how great their development is in
these directions. But we must work with
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The Wisdom of Animals

facts, not sentimental theories. It is the
tone which characterises this school — a tone
rather sentimental and poseur, a tone that
animates much of modern thought, with
which we join issue. If a fox were capable
of the human processes of thought, com-
parison and constructive reasoning with
which, in this story, he is credited, it is un-
believable that the fox family would not
long ago have reached a civilisation com-
parable in some degree with our own.

Whether Nature be the partial expression
of ourselves or we the completest expression
of Nature, is a question we have not, after
so many centuries of co-habitation, finally
settled. We observe the marvellous results
she obtains with the instruments in her pos-
session, but the springs which move her we
have not yet discovered.

" There are mysteries which it is still use-
less for us to interrogate; we do not yet
possess the organ which can receive their
response. Let us content ourselves with
having observed certain manifestations of
this intelligence outside of ourselves . . .
every least manifestation of this sort should
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The Wisdom of Animals

be dear and precious to us," to quote once
more from " L'Intelligence de Fleurs." Let
us indeed observe and ponder. Let us draw
such tentative conclusions as seem most
probable, most likely to help us in our work
of comprehension; but let us make it evi-
dent that these conclusions are no more than
makeshifts that must be altered, given up or
adopted as further investigation and a wider
knowledge give cause. To announce as fact
those suppositions that appeal to our per-
sonal conviction is a form of insincerity
prevalent nowadays and which should not
be allowed to pass unchallenged. The per-
sonal point of view is permissible to every-
one. It is what makes life and intercourse
with one's kind interesting and enjoyable.
But it remains a point of view and not
eternal truth. Haeckel adduces the fact that
the processes of conception, gestation and
birth are precisely similar with the orang-
outang as with man as proof that the ape
and ourselves are identical; that we draw
from no source that is not his. Yet it is im-
possible not to note marked differences be-
tween ape and man, and differences of a
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The Wisdom of Animals

sort too astounding to be settled by the
simple expedient of throwing a few hun-
dred thousand centuries at our heads. To
say that in bodily construction the animal
and we are one and the same, is only a
tremendous argument to prove that some-
thing still needs explaining. We must go
farther even though we fare worse. The
monists, be they Haeckel or Nature Faker,
have not said the final satisfying word.
Hamlet's attitude is still the wiser, and while
we continue to dwell in the midst of mystery
the cock-sure bearing ill becomes us. At
present, anyhow, the cogitations of a moun-
tain lion about to spring on its prey, or the
dreams of a bird on its nest, are beyond our
guessing. The primrose by the river's brim
must remain a simple primrose to us, even
though some writer insist on endowing it
with all our sensations and capacities.
Nature has maintained so far an inviolance
that we should respect, since we have not
yet succeeded in breaking it; and our anx-
iety to surprise her secrets ought not to
permit us to insult her dignity.

142

VISION

THERE comes a day when, although
winter's signs are still flaunted
abroad; though the hollows are filled with
snow, the sky streaked grey and yellow, the
trees bare and bent to the wind; though
the air is nipping for all your brisk walk-
ing; yet that day is a day of spring and
not of winter. You come in flushed and
bright-eyed to announce it to the group hud-
dled before the comfortable fire. But your
herald tidings are received with a sniff
of contempt, a telling glance at the window,
a silent scorn. Nevertheless, it is the truth
— you know it! Somewhere out there you
saw her, the Spring. You felt her breath,
her fingers clasped yours a moment, for an
instant you met her eyes. "Spring has
come," you said, and the moment which
yields the first flower, the first song, can-
not equal this for rapture. It is so inti-
H3

Vision

mate, so sacred, so sweet, this discovery
of yours. Should they ask, those who have
not seen, how you know, — by what signs
you found her, — you cannot reply. The
vision has blessed you and departed. There
are no terms of description for her. But
you know.

Perhaps these unnamable convictions are
the strongest our hearts experience. They
cannot be shaken. There is in them a force
quite unknown to reason, a certainty heaped-
up proofs could never supply.

We have tried to ticket this power, and,
thus labelled, to put it away as done with.
Intuition, perception, — there are various
words for it. That it is real remains be-
yond peradventure true. That we do not
understand it is true again.

Is it something of our own that we might
strengthen and control ? Is it an angel who
walks beside us, and through whose deep-
seeing eyes we may occasionally glance ? Is
it something we have passed, or something
to which we are attaining? We cannot
answer.

That it should be trusted is beside the
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Vision

mirk. One cannot help trusting it. The
pain^r knows it. It has snatched the brush
from his hand and painted his best pictures,
as it hasp given its own words to the singer.
The child holding out his arms to the gruff
old customer the rest of us avoid knows it.
Do you tjiink it is her narrow creed that
has given <yonder poor woman the strength
to smile at, her misfortune, the sublimity of
. sacrifice sine has attained? It is the sweet
\ vision, the mystery she cannot name, which
pias sustained her. "I have seen the
Spring," says her every act. But the on-
looker gazing at the snowdrifts and barren
landscape has no response save an incred-
ulous smile.

The fairy tales tell of talking animals and
trees, of men for whom the silent things
are vocal. We all live in a fairy tale far
more than in what we are pleased to call
the real world, and our happiness depends
largely upon our power to comprehend the
fairy things that are happening to us. If
we listen when the oak commands us to turn
to the right, and not to the left, all goes
well. But if we perversely refuse to believe

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Viskm

that the oak has any means of address*!
us, we run counter to the fairy lawsw
the secret help fails us. If the visim has
vanished, of what use is the realty? If
the spirit of Spring abide not within you,
shall all the flowers and sweet scents and
lovely harmonies of May stir you to happi-
ness? It may not be. Of what use is the
beauty of a child to one who has killed the
fairy child that once walked beside him?
Such an one is deaf and blind, for the wicked
enchanter has possession of him. But for
him who has cherished the vision there lives
something of beauty in every child. The
spirit of childhood has met him and smiled
upon him, and he sees it and draws it forth
again to meet him in each child he en-
counters.

Be this spirit within or without us, it is
assuredly only by heeding that we can pos-
sess it. If you fare not with open eyes, you
will not see the vision. It is a truism that
the tramp trudging the dusty highway may
be thrice happy, when the plutocrat in his
automobile has wretchedness for his com-
panion. It is not what you see and touch
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Vision

that has power to give you happiness. It
is the vision that you carry within you that
has power. This vision does undoubtedly
make what is lovely lovelier, and the beauty
of an Italian lake fairer than a city back-
yard. Yet, were it not for the vision, think
you the lake would glimmer in so mysteri-
ous a way? And but for the vision the
dingy strip of flagging would throw a mor-
tal coldness over your heart. It is still the
vision that is the reality, and lake and tene-
ment are plastic to its magic touch.

When this power beckons, it is wise to
follow; where it forbids, wiser still to hes-
itate. Though one may not always find
reasons in words for obeying, one can al-
ways find them in the region beyond words.
And it is this region to which we do ulti-
mately belong. Its boundaries are indeter-
minate, and most of the territory unknown,
yet who can deny its immanence? Many,
perhaps. But to those who know and have
seen, it were as though a crowd of blind
men should vehemently deny, to one who
saw, that the sun was bright and the earth
beautiful.

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Vision

It is, and must forever be, the unheard
melodies which are sweetest, the unseen
beauty which is fairest. Not because they
are in reality unseen and unheard, but be-
cause they are the most truly heard and
seen of all. When these fail, it is time to
mourn, rather than when material glories
fade. You may lose much and recover.
But lose the vision, and you cannot recover.
Your hold on outside matters should not
relax because mysterious arms are held out
to you beyond. These evanescent realities
are necessary, for the vision must make use
of them as materials for incarnation. It is
because you have seen the spirit of Spring
that the following blossoms and green grass
are peculiarly dear. And it is only he who
hears the skylark as Shelley heard it who
knows the real song of the bird.

In most of us there is a quality that fears
or dislikes this strange power. Some among
us seem wholly to scorn or hate it. But
this is doubtless only seeming, and even the
most misprising of us has somewhere a
secret recognition of the invisible angel. Is
not this terror born of the fear of unreality
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Vision

before reality, of the impermanent before
the permanent, of that which dies before
that which lives? And if you see what I
cannot see, I may laugh at you, but there
will be somewhat of envy mingled with my
laughter.

Who can do his best work unless the
vision be his? If what seems real were
the only reality, there would be little cour-
age in our hearts. It is because we see
what is apparently not there that we strug-
gle with the misery of the tenements, that
we grapple the prison problem, that we fight
the sin in our own hearts. Spring would
probably arrive and embellish the earth
whether or no any seer lingering in the
frozen woods were aware of her impalpable
spirit. But there is another spring that
would never bloom were it not for this same
seer. It is on him that the future of the
world depends. On him, who, looking out
on the barren land, perceives the subtle
change lying so near the surface, catches a
glimmer from a light too keen to be visible,
harkens to those vital words which trans-
cend human speech. He tills his fields, he
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Vision

buys and sells, he votes, he works like other
men. But, be he millionaire or pauper,
President or Socialist, his work and thought
are based on broader foundations, have a
deeper meaning and more far-reaching
effect. The Spring has whispered to him,
and he has come in to us with eyes shining
at a vision that lends strength to his least
effort. We may not believe, but we must
follow him, until, some sudden day, the
flowering trees and green grass thrust the
accomplished fact on our dull senses. The
millennium beacons the souls of such men,
and they will not let us despair. We must
all march onward, keeping time to fairy
music whether we hear it or not. For so
long as even one among us sees and hears
we are safe.

ISO

A RECORD OF QUEENS

OF all the beauty, the interest, the won-
der and terror this world brings to us
from one end of our journey through it to
the other, the most amazing thing we en-
counter is ourselves. Our struggles in our
environment, pushed on by an inexplicable
fervour, dragged back by failure and im-
potence, at once so mighty and so puerile,
giving each other the crudest wounds and
the sublimest self-sacrifice; now hesitating
at nothing to achieve a desired end, again
trembling and dismayed before the shadow
of an unreality — how unending a source of
interest we are to each other ! The trouble
is that so much of the play takes place be-
hind drawn curtains. Doubtless the hedge-
rows and byways are filled with romance
and secret, astonishing battles are fought
out at our very elbows ; but the impenetrable
veil which hangs between most of us and
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A Record of Queens

the rest of the world — so far, at least, as all
save a few intimates are concerned — is not
often lifted. We see it stir in the gust of
some passion, occasionally a groan or a
laugh reveals that there is life behind.
Seldom indeed is it torn down so that every
one may look for himself — look on at the
hopes, the fears, love and hate, the days and
nights of another heart. It is with deep and
unfailing interest that we gaze, marvelling
to find another so unlike ourself, marvel-
ling still more to find him so like — even
where centuries lie between his experience
of life and our own. So it is that autobi-
ographies, biographies of an intimate, per-
sonal sort, letters written to one, but whose
seals death has made free to the world, are
read with a peculiar interest. Turning over
such pages we enter these other lives, our
blood pulses with that of the dead writer,
so living once, who set down or spoke the
words we read while life still drove him
along the strange path whose windings and
doublings we in our turn pursue.

When these transcriptions of the actual
lives of human beings concern themselves
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A Record of Queens

with Kings and Queens, with persons of
rank in the world, in art, literature or on
the stage, persons who oppose so glittering
a front that they disappear in their own
radiance from the dazzled stare of fellow-
sojourners, this interest deepens. Especially
is this the case where women are con-
cerned, perhaps because a woman's life,
even when it is lived in the glare of a throne
or before the footlights, is still apt to be a
more personal, a more passionate and ele-
mental life than a man's. A Louis XIV., a
Napoleon, a Frederick of Prussia, is a man
— he is even more, an epoch. But Marie
Louise, Eugenie, Peg Woffington, Julie de
L'Espinasse — these are women, and women
only, whatever trappings of royalty or
genius may hang upon them. From Sappho
down it is always the vivid individual note
that is struck —

" Let us sit upon the ground,
And tell sad stories of the deaths of kings,"

says Richard II., about to augment them

with his own. But it is the sad lives of

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A Record of Queens

Queens we find told, whenever those lives
are truly told. Observing them casually as
they perform their set pieces and speak
their written parts, they seem a row of gor-
geous butterflies shining with colour, vel-
vet of texture, living on flowers and
fragrance, knowing only blue skies and
summer lands. Yet in these records of
witty or beautiful women, often both beau-
tiful and witty, women who plunged into
the maelstrom of life, Queens of Tragedy
or Comedy, real and make-believe Queens,
Queens of their Country, of Society, of the
Stage, we find the balance heavy on the
side of sorrow. Life plays with them all,
and one by one they leave his table losers
in the game. Marie Antoinette — how she
holds all the winning cards and how she
takes trick after trick — 'her gains heap the
table, fall to the floor unheeded, so fortu-
nate she is! And Eugenie, at the head of
her gay court of beauties and wits, her hand
is royal with trumps. 1 Woman after woman,
the long file sweeps fey us out of the past,
the gleam of life once more alight in lovely
eyes — with the rustle and murmur of silks

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A Record of Queens

and voices, the tempest of quick passions
and high hopes, the pathetic deaths hush-
ing one after the other. How unlike they
are, how infinitely various, yet how they are
all bound together by that iron chain of
tragedy, gay and smiling though many of
them seemed to their contemporaries. The
phrase of Madame du Deffant applies but
too well: "Life, truly estimated, is capable
of only one grand misfortune — itself." She
herself had had all Paris could give her, all
even that she had asked for. Blind and
lonely and old, she sums up living as
synonymous with suffering; and from all
these brilliant women who drank it like
champagne, sparkling against the lips,
comes a sigh of Amen.

Anne of Austria, the heroine of Mrs.
Grant's " Queen and Cardinal," lives per-
haps more vividly for us than many a
greater woman because of those inimitable
romances which Dumas hung upon some of
the events of her life. "The King— the
Queen — the Cardinal ! " cried Aramis,
Porthos, D'Artagnan; and we hear the beat
of horses' hoofs through the wild night
155

A Record of Queens

Mrs. Grant does not give us much more his-
tory than the famous Frenchman supplied;
but we get all we need, for the book's aim is
to portray Anne, the woman. It is the neg-
lected wife, the so lonely young Queen, the
last object of fiery Buckingham's devotion,
the doting mother, of the grand Louis, the
mistress of Mazarin through, many years,
whom we are shown. The Court atmos-
phere has been admirably indicated — the
intrigues, the gallantries, the mighty battles
over questions of etiquette, the breaking of
hearts behind smiling lips. We get the
tittle-tattle of the courtiers, we are shown
the letters of the Queen, who having learned
to love in middle age seems never to have
wavered in her devotion. The Cardinal
commands her, brow-beats her, brings her
to tears: proud Anne of Austria is meek
enough with him. Perhaps the author
makes too little of the Queen and too much
of the woman. In the first part of the book
Anne is always royal, but toward the end
she degenerates into a plump bourgeoise,
fluttering ineffectually between the Cardinal
and her son. The book opens with the

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A Record of Queens

description of one marriage between France
and Spain and closes virtually with a sec-
ond. The first time it is Anne coming to
be the wife of the thirteenth Louis, who goes
off duck-shooting after the ceremony, re-
fusing to have anything to do with his new
bride. The last picture is the gallant and
handsome Louis Quatorze, just off with his
passion for Marie Mancini, riding lover-
like beside the young Infanta. Almost half
a century lies between these two scenes and
the chief part of Anne's life with it. On
the whole a gentle, unselfish, but lazy and
stupid life. The best in it was her love of
Mazarin, whose cold, ambitious spirit made
but a chill return. She lived five years after
his death, dragging out the last three in a
struggle against the horrors of cancer. As
to the question of a secret marriage between
the two, Mrs. Grant does not attempt an
answer; the testimony, she declares, is too
conflicting.

In Arvede Barine's "Princesses and

Court Ladies," we get still another glimpse

of this Queen. Her charming sketch of the

Regency, summed up in the portrait of

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Marie Mancini, has a distinction and force
quite foreign to Mrs. Grant's work. It is
as vivid as a gypsy dance, as entertaining
as a fairy tale : The dark-eyed adventuress,
full of passion and intelligence; Louis,
young, ardent, imaginative; the Queen
proud and conscious of her royal blood, lov-
ing Mazarin, to be sure, but not losing her
queenliness thereby and forcing him to bow
to her scorn of an alliance with his house.
The Cardinal forbids the marriage, incident-
ally taking all the credit to himself. Louis
submits with tears and threats, Marie fights
with fury and wit; then the Infanta rises
over the Spanish horizon and the Cardinal
wins, though it is only at the last moment,
for Marie single-handed is almost a match
for the whole of them. The crown of
France thus slips from her hands and she
finally marries the Connetable of Colonna.
First she loves him, then she hates him, and
spends a wild adventurous life fleeing from
him through half the countries of Europe
in every sort of disguise, stirring up con-
vents of peaceful nuns in her meteor tran-
sits, rushing hither and thither, disappear-

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A Record of Queens

ll *g at last and dying no one knows when
°r how:

" One can imagine her old, with her wild
Unkempt hair, sordid in her dress, wrinkled,
lialf impotent. Of her lost splendour noth-
ing remains but the fire of her dark eyes.
She tells fortunes and the future remains
dark. She lives in the past. She takes her
guitar, plays and muses. She dreams that
once she barely missed being Queen of
France."

Queen Christina of Sweden was as ad-
venturous as the Mancini gypsy, for all her
royal blood. Her father was the great
Gustavus, her mother was a fool and her
upbringing an amazing farce. She began
by living in books and ended by swaggering
over Europe in men's clothes, by murdering
a discarded lover, by wrangling for money
like a cocher for a pourboire. Insolently
witty, scorning her womanhood, passion-
ately egotistical, she gave up her respon-
sibilities as Queen when they bored her and
never assumed any others in their place.
"The Stroller Queen," she became one of
the sights of her time, and crowds waited
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A Record of Queens

at their city gates to see her. But she
palled in the course of years and it was
■with a certain relief that the throng fol-
lowed the last splendid pageant which saw
her to her grave.

With the same exquisite spirit Barine re-
creates for us an Arabian princess, paints
us the Duchesse de Maine and the Mar-
gravine of Bayreuth. Princess Solme, Arab
inmate of a harem, runs away with and
marries a German. He is killed three years
later, and these memoirs voice her Oriental
longing for the ways and life of her own
people, for the perfumed idleness of the
harem, for the clink of bracelets, the
fragrant nights and fervid days. This poor
little princess lost in a strange land, lost
still more utterly when after twenty years
she thinks by returning to find her own
country — how absurdly pathetic she is, as
tragic as any of the rest of these forlorn
princesses, who, in the words of Grumkow,
"Are born to be sacrificed to the weal of
their country." The Princess Wilhelmina
to whom these words were addressed cer-
tainly lived a life of terror and privation
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A Record of Queens

^rhich no child of the slums who could crawl
to the police courts would suffer. Yet she
was a sister to Frederick the Great But
old Frederick William, their father, pos-
sessed an infinite capacity for making those
about him unhappy, a capacity he never
neglected. The redeeming thing in her
story is the exquisite love which subsisted
between brother and sister, enduring till her
death. So that for a year thereafter Fred-
erick had but one cry — "In losing her I
have lost all."

In a substantial volume of more than
three hundred pages we are told of "The
Flight of Marie Antoinette." Nor are they
any too many for the telling of this colossal
failure, with its fatal consequences to al-
most everybody concerned in it. It is an
extraordinary story, full of absurd impos-
sibilities, only they happen to be facts, and
reveal inconceivable traits of human nature
— a mad tragi-comedy played by doomed
Punchinellos and ending in death. After
breathlessly watching the almost miraculous
escape of the royal family from the palace,
where every door is guarded and pages and
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A Record of Queens

ladies-in-waiting actually lie at the feet and
across the doorways of their masters and
mistresses, we follow the big Berline from
post to post. The Comte de Fersen is the
magician who brings his beloved Queen and
her family safe through the circle of fire;
then he has to leave them and his spells
faiL Everything goes wrong, and at Va-
rennes, amid flaming torches, excitement,
pistol shots, shouts, drunken soldiers and be-
wildered officials, the escape ends — is proved
never to have been an escape. Next we
get a glimpse of Paris on finding itself
without a King; seething, turbulent, shak-
ing its fist in the face of Lafayette, " who
walked quickly along . . . with the bearing
of a soldier, dignified, almost gay, tower-
ing above the crowd, his face pale and ex-
pressionless.'' The crowd penetrates for
the first time into the palace, but it is
respectful, curious, amused, not destructive.
It jokes with the dismayed postman —
" They've gone, leaving no address."

Monsieur Lenotre succeeds in giving us
the vibrant atmosphere of the populace with
remarkable sympathy, particularly since his
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A Record of Queens

insight into the feelings of the King and
Q vieen is so happy. We pity them, we long
*°r their escape, and yet we understand the
driven and desperate people. That pursuit,
>vith the mad riders galloping through the
night, crossing each other, falling exhausted,
struggling on. Then the terrible return of
the poor trapped creatures through a
frenzied country, accompanied by murder,
riot and outrage. We hear the cries of the
little Dauphin, we feel the helpless agony
of his mother. As for the King — " that
mass of flesh appeared to have no feeling/'
according to the Deputy Petion, who formed
one of his escort — rather, one of his gaolers.
Five days from the night of their departure
(June 20th-25th) the royal family re-
entered Paris amid crowds vast, silent,
hostile. The little journey had turned
Marie Antoinette's hair white — "white as
a woman's of seventy."

One after another the actors in this drama
are followed to their end, usually a tragic
one. One falls into a well and dies ; another
is eaten by wolves. Even Fersen, le beau
Fersen, nineteen years to the day on which

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he had tried to save his beloved Queen, is
torn to pieces by a mob in the streets of
Stockholm, revenging on him a crime he had
never committed. Varennes itself, the little
unknown peaceful town, is ruined from the
fatal night when it barred the further prog-
ress of its King, and years pass before it fi
recovers. There was never another story
like this, and, told as it is here, it wrings
the heart.

Mrs. Bearne, in her " Heroines of French
Society," gives us the portraits of four in-
teresting and widely different women:
Madame Le Brun, the artist; Madame Le
Marquise de Montague, an Emigree and the
pink of propriety in a dissolute age ; Madame
Tallien, a Spaniard both beautiful and gay,
who, as the wife of an escaped Aristocrat,
though herself a Revolutionist, is about to
die on the guillotine when Tallien, master
of the Terror at Bordeaux, falls in love with
her ai?d makes her his mistress. In the end
she reforms and dies a princess. Last there
is Madame de Genlis, the mistress of
Philippe Egalite and governess of his chil-
dren. The volume is full of stirring pic-
164

A Record of Queens

tures of the Terror and moves with spirit;
j and by hook or crook all of its heroines
i escape the guillotine.
1 Madame Recamier, as painted by David

and Gerard, has given lovers of beauty
happiness for several generations. Even so
she bewitched the people of her own time,
and H. Noel Williams presents us with the
details of her long queenship of Parisian
society. Married to a man old enough to be
her father — and by some said to be so,
especially as the marriage was merely a
nominal one — she began life while the
Terror was in full swing. She lived to be
admired by Napoleon, to become the friend
of Madame de Stael and to be loved by
Chateaubriand. She gathered around her
one of the most remarkable salons Paris
has known. She must have been an exqui-
site creature, ever more thoughtful of others
than herself, even after she had grown blind.
"Her history was to be loved," says her
friend, the Comtesse d'Hautefeuille. " What
other glory is so enviable ? "

In "The Life of the Empress Eugenie"
and "Women of the Second Empire" we

165

A Record of Queens

have two books on the same period, the
latter being peculiarly interesting, as it is
largely derived from hitherto unpublished
MSS. and is written by a man who person-
ally knew, in their grey later years, many
of that gay court Women have always had
their fingers in the pie of French politics,
and if here, according to Mr. Whiteing's de-
lightful introduction, they played a rather
sinister part, it was none the less an inter-
esting one. Probably court life here gave
its last great representation on the world's
stage. Never will that romantic brilliance,
that butterfly wonder hovering over stress
and tragedy, that essence of idleness, wit,
and intellect, so intoxicating, so dangerous
yet so fascinating, exist again. It is not
likely that we shall ever return that way.

Jane T. Stoddart's life of the Empress is
neither so entertaining nor so brilliant as
Loliee's book, but it supplies the connected
story, together with many an interesting
page on the splendour of the court, and
later on the contrast of the Empress's child-
less and widowed years. We may see in
these books the passing of woman's influ-
166

A Record of Queens

ence in politics — that is, of the picturesque
influence of her smiles, her tears, her beauty,
her sex. The cold wind from Prussia
blows them all away, withered, dying, ex-
tinguished.

One of the most interesting women who
have dominated French society is surely
Mile, de TEspinasse. More than one book
has been written around her, but this simple
record of her life by the Marquis de Segur
is by far the most interesting of them all.
It is breathlessly full of living, yet it fol-
lows the so often travelled path of disillu-
sionment and suffering to the grave. She
held her radiant court of wit and beauty,
she loved and lost, and died broken-
hearted.

With Queen Louisa of Prussia we leave
France and cross over to its enemy. It is
good to get a life of this beautiful woman,
so full of dignity and courage, the friend
and beloved of her people, the unfaltering
helpmeet of her husband through the long
troubles of the Napoleonic wars, although
the King, harassed by his great foe and in
the hands of evil counsellors, was often, to
167

A Record of Queens

put it mildly, extremely difficult. She suf-
fered, being great, the pain of having for
king and husband a man who was not great
But on the other hand she had the happi-
ness of loving this man and of being loved
by him. She carried the sorrows of her
people in her heart, but her trust in God
was infinite. She wrote from the midst of
her losses and defeats, " My kingdom is not
of this world." The shadow of Napoleon
lay black across her life. As this shadow
faded, death laid its hand upon her. She
had had a few days of happiness at her
father's house, as a little note, the last
words she ever wrote, proves. ". . . My
dear Father: I am very happy as your
daughter and the wife of the best of hus-
bands." This was written on June 28, and
on July 18 she died in her husband's arms
of congestion of the lungs.

From the real queens we turn, for the
last book on our list, to John Fyvie's
"Comedy Queens of the Georgian Era."
There are a dozen of them, and their lives
are a strange medley. Tragedy was not al-
ways absent even from these stage royalties.
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A Record of Queens

Beauty, charm, wit, and the fervour of life
they possessed in abundance. Princes were
among their lovers, and more than one
married a title. Several died in obscurity
and disappointment; but, on the whole, a
breath of light-heartedness pervades these
stories. The ladies are merry, and it is with
a smile that we close the book, half expect-
ing to see it dance a little as we return it
to the shelf, chuckling over the wild doings
of Peg Woffington and her sisters in
comedy. A make-believe queen seems to
have rather the better of it in the play of
life, perhaps because she is not quite so often
called upon to be a make-believe woman.
Make-believe, except for children, is a
dangerous occupation. Life insists upon
reality and achieves it somehow, if it be
only through torture and death. The lives
of these women were generally sad, but it
was this unlooked-for and undesired sorrow
that made them real. By it they became
actual human beings instead of remaining
simply the decorated figure-heads placed by
convention at the head of a nation.

169

LOVE AS A JOKE

FALLING in love, often regarded "as
the supreme adventure, the supreme
romantic accident," is treated as a joke in
Mr. Tom Masson's new anthology, "The
Humour of Love." There are two vol-
umes, one for the prose, the other for
verse. A large proportion of the com-
munity will regard the title Mr. Masson
has chosen for his anthology with a good
deal of doubt. "The humour of love,"
cries Strephon, forsooth! taking a long
look at the picture of Phyllis in his watch-
case. "The Humour of Love?" No, it
won't do at all ! Here he is, burning with
agony, shivering with fear, trembling with
ecstasy, or sick with despair; in deep
anxiety he is weighing every glance, move-
ment, word. He pants toward the next
meeting, ponders over the past one; stands
new-born into a strange world, where all
17Q

Love as a Joke

the old values are topsy-turvy and the fresh
ones hitherto undreamed of; and behold his
divine madness broken in on by two gay
little volumes with a ready-prepared chuckle,
and Cupid, in cap and bells, perched on a
golden heart, decorating their covers. It
makes Strephon feel both superior and un-
comfortable. As for Phyllis herself? Who
can presume to look into her heart as it be-
gins to flutter toward its goal in Strephon's
bosom. Scarcely she herself. Yet he who
runs may venture to assert that the action,
at least to her own mind, is unassociated
with any idea of amusement. The books,
nevertheless, bear the magic word that
makes this amazing world worth while. So
Strephon and Phyllis, among the rest, will
buy them, having their own opinion of Mr.
Masson all the while. To " have your own
opinion" of anything always means some-
thing derogatory to that thing. And since
they are probably reading a good deal of
Tennyson just now the descriptive phrase,
" Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn
of scorn," might occur to them as best suit-
ing that opinion.

171

Love as a Joke

But there are some of us who are either
not in love or are pretending not to be
Forced to put a smile on our sorry state, we
are only too glad of a chance for a laugh
at what we secretly envy, and we turn the
pages of these volumes with delight. Here
is our old friend Jos Sedley — we can have
another laugh at him as he flounders in the
net of Becky's subtle schemes. And Uncle
Toby, planning his campaign against the
supposedly unconscious widow, or Artemus
Ward indignantly repelling the too ardent
Mormon ladies, how they rejoice us I
What, by the way, would become of many
of our American humourists if reformed
spelling became an actuality? Ceasing to
be singular in that respect, would not much
of their work acquire a sober, scientific cast
strangely at variance with their reputations ?
Like other unsuccessful reformers, the
world has elected to laugh at them. Yet
transposed into old-style spelling, would
not passages of Artemus Ward, for in-
stance, be taken rather seriously than
humorously.

"You are a married man, Mr. Young,
172

Love as a Joke

I believe?" said I, writing him some free
passes.

" I have eighty wives, Mr. Ward. I cer-
tainly am married."

" How do you like it, as far as you have
got?" said I.

He said: "Middling. ... I find that the
cares of married life weigh heavily on me,
and sometimes I wish I'd remained single."

Mr. Masson himself indulges in a few
laughs at Cupid's expense, and incidentally
explains his stand:

" It is a threadbare fact that the element
of foolishness is paramount in all love mat-
ters ... he won her by the measure of
his incapacity, and this is the secret of
love's success."

If this be not tragic it is certainly comic,
and naturally all the world loves a lover,
as it loves any other good permanent joke,
even though much of the time the joke is on
itself.

But see Phyllis shakes her black, gold, or
red head; and Strephon, gazing into her
grey, brown, or blue eyes, shakes his.
173

Love as a Joke

"This may be humour," says he, "but ^
it love?"

" I am in love, Corporal," quoth my Uncle
Toby.

"In love?" said the Corporal. "Your
Honour was very well the day before yes-
terday . . ."

But Uncle Toby is far too much concerned
about his red plush breeches to convince
either of our friends.

"No, it's only near-love, all this show-
ing by the humourists, from Thackeray
and George Eliot to Billy Baxter and Josh
Billings. These old men burning for a
young coquette, these prigs enamoured of
themselves, these masters of strange Eng-
lish talking over the divine passion —
pshaw ! " exclaims Strephon.

"But how about the poetry volume?"
asks Phyllis, blushing a little, for hasn't
Strephon just written her the most beautiful
poem in the world?

" That's rather better," he answers, look-
ing through it. " Here's ' Why So Pale and
Wan, Fond Lover ? ' which I read you only
yesterday. Ben Jonson, too:

174

Love as a Joke

"'Beauties, have ye seen this toy
Called Love, a little boy,
Almost naked, wanton, blind,
Cruel now, and then as kind?'

They are all right And here's Lowell with
'The Courtin":

" ' He stood a spell on one foot first
Then stood a spell on t'other,
An* on which one he felt the worst
He couldn't ha' told ye, nuther.'

Do you know, I felt rather that way be-
fore "

"But why not," says Phyllis, "have
chosen from Shakespeare the passage where
Beatrice and Benedick fell in love instead
of the boisterous fun of Pyramus and
Thisbe, since it is the humour of love we're
after?"

But, after all, the omissions in an an-
thology are always its most salient char-
acteristic, and Mr. Masson warns us, in his
introduction, which is printed in the second
volume, to expect them. There is a lot of
fun in the two books, as a glance over the
index of authors cannot but show. Surely,

*75

Love as a Joke

nearly every writer in English who has haf
a rhymed or prose fling at the passion ap-
pears here. The men have greatly the
majority, for among the eighty authors
quoted barely ten belong to what is evidently
the more sober sex. Woman doesn't see the
twinkle in Love's eyes; it is the tears which
interest her.

"A woman ought to be careful who she
marries," said Mr. Dooley.

"So ought a man," said Mr. Hennessy,
with feeling.

But, on the other hand, Mr. G. K. Ches-
terton says somewhere:

" Let us be careful about the small things,
such as a scratch or a slight illness, or any-
thing that can be managed with care. But,
in the name of all sanity, let us be careless
about the important things, such as mar-
riage, or the fountains of our very life will
fail."

There, so very wonderfully, we are.

176

MAIA!

I TAIA — how soft a word, how musical,
•VJL how mysterious! Maia — Illusion,
/hat should we do without it, how far from
it apehood would we have climbed with-
at the help of Maia? That shimmering
ght that has beautified for us so many
:herwise rough and dreary roads, that
mnd and fragrance of we know not what
lat persuades us on. Dangerous it is, but
anger never stopped man long. Danger
:nds the last, the perfect touch — Illusion,
t wraps itself about some commonplace
erson or thing and straightway behold the
upossible achieved. What fairy tale ever
Did of metamorphoses half so amazing as
hose accomplished by Maia? How many a
lilkmaid has she not changed to a princess,
;ow many a sorry fellow has she not dow-
red with the bearing and splendour of a
tero? And where, except through the
177

Maia

meshes of her veil, can we see such tender
landscapes, such exquisite palaces, grottoes
so bewilderingly lovely? Stout Mr. Brown,
walking beside Mr. White, sees before him a
pebble path ending in a flight of steps, on
top of which, framed in the glare of light
falling through the doorway, stands his
daughter in a fresh white dress, looking
sweet and calling a pleasant welcome. But
White? White is the prisoner of Maia the
enchantress, and he is seeing celestial
visions and hearing strains of melody that
all the powers of the language were inade-
quate to describe and which Paradise will
hardly equal.

Illusion has many potentialities. To the
poet she gives the glory of his song, to the
painter the mystery within his picture, to
the sculptor she is the divinity that shapes
the clay, and without her the enthusiast
could never hold to his high aim. Without
her they must all stop working. Love clothes
himself in her garments and moves in
her light. More real than reality, life itself
would cease without her help. She is the
breath of the soul. We call her Maia, illu-

i 7 8

Maia

sion, unreal, unbelievable. But in what do
we believe more fervently than on her? It
is our illusion about ourselves that permits
us to go on undaunted in our extraordinary
struggle with the odds against us, the perils
that environ us. Our illusion about our
work, about our indispensabilty, our illu-
sion — sometimes pathetic, sometimes noble
— about others that makes it possible for us
to exist. It is illusion that forms the woof
of the material out of which we fashion our
life. We have our moments, our hours, it
may be, of clear seeing — we " see things as
they are," we say. But this is as rare
as it is usually painful, and perhaps it
is not so salutary as we have been led to
suppose. If we were obliged to do it con-
stantly, if Maia actually withdrew from the
world, could we manage to keep up, to go
on? Like wanderers in a desert urged on
beyond their strength by the mirage that
spreads its fairy loveliness before their dy-
ing eyes, we struggle on, gazing at the
silver streams and swaying trees, taking
one step after another — winning on and on
— reaching, who knows, a place of rescue
179

Maia

in the end we never could have reached
but for that shadow of beauty and promise
that came and went before our dazzled
vision.

Who shall dare say that Maia may not
prove to be the one great reality? This
something in us that sees her gracious form
under the rough shapes of the world, that
hears her voice calling through the shouts
and cries of trouble and confusion — this part
of us may prove to be the most enduring
and the most important part. We build our
souls out of much that the material side of
us rejects as absurd, even as non-existent
We call love blind because he sees the be-
loved as more exquisite than mortal ever
was. But though he looks through the
mystic eyes of Maia can we be sure he does
not see farther than any one else ?

" Shocking state the path's in," observes
stout Mr. Brown, puffing a bit at the top
step. "I must have it seen to at once.
How are you, Rosie, child? I've brought
White home to dinner; pot-luck, you
know."

To White the path has not been shocking.
1 80

Maia

bite each step has been an enthusiasm,
ire, and Maia, smiling before him, has
i a mirage so perfect that he will die
lin it: nor could all the logic of the
onvince him of its unreality.

181

THE SENSE OF DUTY

AS there is in the human eye a blind
spot, a dead centre, necessary but in
itself nothing, so among moral qualities
there is a corresponding spot destitute of
life, entitled the sense of duty. This sense
has, to be sure, received from man a vast
amount of praise — worship indeed — and
many high-sounding phrases embody the
word itself. The one, perhaps, best known,
"England expects every man to do his
duty," was uttered by a man whom duty
swayed not at all, but a passionate enthu-
siasm, a lofty love and a splendid ambi-
tion.

Yet it has come to express Nelson to us
and so to add to the misapprehension of
what duty really is.

When, in "The Master Builder," Hilda
WangePs impetuous thanks are met by Mrs.
Solness's "It is my Duty," Hilda turns
182

The Sense of Duty

chilled and disheartened. We all un-
nd her feelings. What is done for the
)f duty is the creation of death, not
A.nd the works of death are inimical,
tig with them a touch of poison that
s the heart it touches. The acts oc-
ed by that sense are not born of love
ers, but of love of self. The woman
oes into the slums to work among the
unates there because she conceives it

her duty to do so, will accomplish
g. She may feed some hungry
:hs or clothe a few naked bodies, she
ouse the homeless, yet in the end the
vill be eaten, the clothes in rags, the
; ruined and nothing remain. There

in what she has done no vitality, for
:t that lacks the soul of love is no
than a meaningless gesture, repelling
he most thoughtless.
$ sense of duty is not without value.

a negative, resisting force against

we may fashion what is really fine,
'e must keep it in its place. It now
, sick with pride, among the loveliest
ites we possess, certain that of them

183

The Sense of Duty

all it is the most to be desired and the Waef
to attain.

" It is nine and the beds are not made," i
observes sternly. Terrible sentence. W< ^
are idling over a charming if unnecessary
fire, a wood fire that will only burn for thisj
half hour after breakfast, before we begin
the varied occupations of the day. There
are curious little blue and green flames
jumping up and down on the crumbling log
we want to look at carefully, and then there
is a delightful glow of warmth spreading
up our legs, getting perhaps a trifle too in-
tense, though we cannot be quite sure of
that — we need a bit more time to decide.
And Duty comes in with that remark and
the clock to bear her out.

Or it may be a few of us have gone on a
tramp of a golden October afternoon. We
have been through woods and over fields,
and now, on a western-facing hillslope, we
sit down to watch the sunset begin to cre-
ate glory in the heavens — spread its pas-
sionate colour in waving lines from south to
north, flood the valley with illusion, burn a
more vivid splendour into the frost-turned
184

The Sense of Duty

leaves; when up steps the member of the
party possessed by that devil of a sense
and says :

"Come on now, we must start back at
once, we've only just time to reach home
and get ready for dinner. . . ."

Perhaps this attack on so estimable and
revered a quality may cause people to start
up with cries of rage and pain. "Where
would we be if we sat round on hillsides
instead of getting home on time ? " " How
long should we keep our servants if that
were to become the rule ? " " If you don't
do things when they ought to be done, when
on earth are you going to do them ? " " You
know I always darn the stockings Tuesday
morning, so why do you ask me to go out
with you — who's to do them, I'd like to
know?"

It is all unanswerable. You are silent
and abashed, but nevertheless an inner
wrath consumes you. Because, although you
can think of no argument in reply, you
feel it is all wrong. These things do not
really matter, yet they impose on life to
such an extent that they have come to rule

185

The Sense of Duty

everything. Duty reigns triumphant, loaded
with the pots and pans of the world, armed
with an overpowering logic and the fatal
phrase, Do It Now.

Look at him, she says, her cold and stead-
fast eyes fastened on the meagre and
harassed face of an artist who is bending
feverishly over his work, stretching his
weary body restlessly, burning the candle of
his life at both ends and showing, for his
pains, a bare room and a shabby coat. Look
at him, that's all, says Duty, with a sniff.
If he'd taken me into partnership he
wouldn't look like that. I should never
have allowed him to fool away the last two
months in the country when he ought to
have been working. And why did he lend
his friend that money? It was none of his
affair; he's got just what he deserved. If
he had listened to me he wouldn't have all
this trouble on his shoulders nor all those
lines in his face.

Perhaps. But look here, Duty. What of

the things I see about me? What of this

statue whose supple and gracious lines

breathe a peace and an attainment before

186

The Sense of Duty

which your accomplishments, your comfort,
— look — why, I cannot even see them.
What about this song, Duty? how it stirs
the heart of the hearer, lifting him into a re-
gion where nothing vulgar or cruel may
enter, lending him an ardour that sends him
on the noble way again, refreshed, remade.
And this man, rather scarred and common
to the outward eye, yet giving around him
in some strange way laughter, happiness,
hope where there had been sorrow and dark-
ness. Is he your son, Duty? Are any of
these things your work? Are they yours,
the kisses that young mother showers on
her child, the ardent embrace of those
lovers? Yours, this work that was done
that another's eyes might brighten with joy,
yours. . . .

These apostrophes are doubtless most
poetical, observes Duty, but I must be off.
I have a young man to keep out of the gin-
shop— not that that will interest you.

Hold, Duty. Can you accomplish even so
much? Is it you who will keep him out,
finally? He may use you for awhile, for
you are useful in your way; but it will be

187

The Sense of Duty

something better than you that must come
to help him if he is really to turn his back
on debauchery and be a man.

Of course we must have duty to make the
chalkmarks for us, to build the walls and
run the engines of the world. But she never
sang our folk-songs nor erected our beau-
tiful temples, nor met us with a glow of
tenderness when we were sick or sad. She
never lighted for us the torches of enthu-
siasm, devotion and rapture that have made
it possible for us to traverse the dark valleys
of life. Cold water and a timepiece are her
adjuncts, a severe brow and an asperity of
voice. Though the paths she treads are
often difficult enough, no generous ardour
leads her there, she is still an egoist. To
be sure she keeps us moving at times when
our more glorious guides have flown or
evaded us. A staff, if not a guidon, we
must not despise nor entirely overlook her.
But let us beware of allowing her to rule
our lives or we shall never live at all. He
who remains on the hillside with the sunset
while dinner grows cold and you cross may
be able to teach you a lesson far worthier
188

The Sense of Duty

of learning than any ypu can teach him.
Occupied with the daily round, Duty has no
time to sit at the feet of the Christ, to seize
from the passing hour the precious, im-
mortal moments it may contain, at whatever
cost to material comfort or conventional
usage. Yet leave these moments out of life
and how vast is the loss. Time and tide
wait for no man, we are told. Well, what
of it? Let man take the gifts they bring as
they pass, and he will rule them and not
they him. Duty, narrow in heart and mind,
speaks to him only in the language of mor-
tality. And who that has indeed warmed
himself before the fire of life but knows that
language to be incapable of speaking even
one of the great words that interpret the
soul. Let Duty be his handmaid, by all
means. But the princess of his heart must
be of a diviner heritage, must come of an
immortal strain.

189

ADVICE TO A GIRL

YOUTH, poised on perilous tiptoe above
the abyss of the world, how many are
the warnings shouted to you, how unlimited
the help offered to you, how firm the point-
ing, numerous fingers indicating the safe
steps, the comfortable bridge which you

must take or else Ah, what else? says

eager youth, looking brightly down into the
dusky depths. What goes on there amid the
roar of cataracts, the dust of endeavour, the
turmoil of struggle?

In the ages since Aristotle it has not be-
come advisable to change the descriptive
phrase, "Man is a political animal," to
"Man is a political angel." Nor have the
counsels of a thousand aunts and uncles
succeeded in keeping their nieces and neph-
ews between the hedges so industriously
planted by woodland wanderers returning
from adventurous forays beyond the dim
190

Advice to a Girl

horizon. Blessed immutable human nature,
whose great privilege it is never to learn
by the experience of others. Is not the
background of life hazy with waving, warn-
ing hands? Does not echo come burdened
with ancestral voices prophesying destruc-
tion unless, etcetera? And do we not each
go on with the sublime scramble up our
lonely trail with slight care for the blazes
of the preceding generation?

There is a soft spot in the human heart
for the platitude. Lincoln's dictum applies
here as in so many other cases. I remember
a book called " Leila on the Island," which
tells of a girl who was shipwrecked, to-
gether with her father and properly aged
nurse, on an island provided with all the
accessories which islands in the line of
wrecks possess. Many and many a time as
a child did I go through the pages of that
book spellbound alike by the miraculous
achievements of the island and the sonorous
periods of the father's advice to his daugh-
ter on life and religion. If only, thought
I, my father would talk to me like this, how
191

Advice to a Girl

wonderful it would be and how noble my
life would become. But I never dragged
any lofty talk out of my father, though my
actions, certainly more criminal than Leila's,
surely offered sufficient opportunity. I do
not remember that he even once sadly shook
his head and addressed me as " My poor, in-
nocent child," the so constant and delight-
ful practice of Leila's excellent papa.

"Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be
clever,"

has thrilled more hearts than

" O fret not after knowledge — I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the
warmth.
O fret not after knowledge — I have none,
And yet the Evening listens,"

because platitude always wins over poetry.
Perhaps young-eyed childhood sees poetry
in everything. As has been said, "The
starry enthusiasm of the bore is not without
a certain poetry ; it is the bored who is ut-
terly prosaic." The fresh spirit of youth
finds even in husks a fragrance as of rose
192

Advice to a Girl

petals, and in the most platitudinous of
books a hint of fairy tale and wonder.

These reflections evolved in me after
looking through one of those volumes dedi-
cated to imparting advice to the young, and
especially to the young woman, which are
more or less epidemic to the book trade.
Countless respectable old ladies derive a
great deal of comfort from books of this
sort, and if in the unregenerate their ten-
dency is to arouse one of those desper-
ate desires— desires to which circumstance
usually opposes an impregnable barrier —
which a lifted forefinger does somehow oc-
casion, yet these books have a certain value
in that they shadow out their generation to
quite a remarkable degree. For instance,
there is on my shelves a stout maroon-col-
oured volume entitled " The Young Ladies'
Book," and printed many years ago in Eng-
land. It was presented to me on my fif-
teenth birthday by an elderly Englishman
with a deep voice and an intimidating man-
ner, who expressed the conviction that if
American young women would conform to
the teachings of its many pages, America
193

Advice to a Girl

would be a far pleasanter place for a self-
respecting man to inhabit.

At the time I relegated the book to some
unget-at-able spot, but nowadays I often
spend a pleasing hour poring over its quaint
advice, its lost-in-the-past rules. I delight in
its chapters on deportment, breathing a scent
of lavender and leisure, its hints on the
raising of canaries, on singing, sketching,
and needlework.

"No young gentlewoman will neglect
this genteel occupation, at once so fitted for
the fireside and so conducive to a useful and
well-ordered habit of mind."

Pages, too, of advice on parish work and
visiting, and recipes for the toilette. A gen-
tle intimation that "a young, unmarried
lady should not attract attention to herself
by loud or excessive conversation, nor yet
by asserting opinions that might possibly
be contrary to those held by older and wiser
persons." Nay, she should seek to efface
herself by "a modest and retiring manner
that will not be found lacking in its effect
on the opposite sex— or on such members of
it as possess sense and discretion."

194

Advice to a Girl

Shades of Thackeray and Trollope ! We
have spun a long way down the ringing
grooves of change since such pages could
guide the young woman to a proper expres-
sion of herself. And where more easily can
we read the proofs of this journey than in
the present-day compilations directed to the
same end?

Nowadays she is told how to behave in
the office to which she almost invariably
gravitates. How to defend herself against
undue rudeness or familiarity, and yet hold
down her job. She is told how to acquire
a fund of small talk, evidently an indispen-
sable requirement in a society that appears
to exist solely because of an entire absence
of brains. Noise there must be, and she
must contribute her share. She is coached
in bridge, she is informed how to dress ap-
propriately for business or the opera; how
to travel alone. The home circle is not
often alluded to, seems indeed chiefly re-
markable for its distance, like the views
from advertised hotels. Yes, there is plenty
of evidence that the girl to-day is a very
different creature from herself of fifty years
195

Advice to a Girl

ago. But these books have one thing i^
common. It is an unmistakable attitude, a
timidity, a bearing that makes them more
acceptable to the old ladies aforesaid than
to the young to whom they are addressed.
Youth will continue, as ever, to seek the
knees of the rough old teacher Life, and to
struggle to force from her slow lips the few
but unforgettable words which she at times
vouchsafes. These books register those
changes which have come about because
they themselves were steadily ignored; for
advice and precaution are not the elements
out of which man fashions his life. The
conservative is doomed to remain forever
in the attitude of uplifted hands and open
mouth which the forward turning of the
world imposes upon him. Though he may
seem to the conservative who preceded him
a daring and abandoned creature, he is
really quite the same. It is the world that
has changed, that has hung a new cloak on
him and given him other words to clothe
the old ideas. But this change in his gar-
ments and his language tells us much of
that world he is always trying to cramp
196

Advice to a Girl

and to retard. The chameleon among us, he
remains essentially the same, while taking
the colour of the generation upon which he
rests. Change and growth are the only
realities, which he, like a mirror, reflects,
remaining himself unaffected. So that these
books on etiquette, on social customs, and
the proprieties of life, have a quite peculiar
charm, providing, as it were, the quicksilver
to spread on the glass through which we
are observing life, and giving us thus a re-
flection of our own phase as interesting as
it is true. Because the spirit of such a book
as "The Letters of a Business Woman to
Her Niece" is identical with the spirit in-
forming the " Young Ladies' " book of two
generations ago, the difference in its material
expression will tell us as much as the clev-
erest novel of life and manners, and will
do it so unconsciously as to be perhaps the
more valuable of the two. Human nature
is the terrible bugaboo of this kind of book,
but human nature somehow shines through
them. Where would be the use of all these
rules and regulations were it not, of course,
for human nature? The young lady in ma-
197

Advice to a Girl

toon sitting with demure looks over her
needlework and going her neat round from
morning to night doubtless had her own
difficulties with it. There are things more
enthralling than bridge, warmer and more
vital than systems and conventions. Our
pulses stir, our eyes brighten, we fill our
lungs with the breath of life. We claim the
immemorial privilege, and leaving our vol-
ume of advice in the hands of our grand-
mother, who doesn't need it and therefore
approves of it, we go forth to assist in build-
ing the new world forever awaiting us.
The rules contrived to keep our adventurous
prehistoric sister in her cage failed, even as
these present rules promulgated against our
own liberty must also fail. No little horde
of maxims will succeed finally in preaching
down a life. But the constant makeshifts
forced upon the users of these futile
weapons are interesting to observe, nor do
they lack in material for humour.

198

CINDERELLA

TRY to tell the child who comes to your
knee for a story something other than
Cinderella or Red Riding Hood or the thrill-
ing account of how you hurt your " fumb,"
with all the bloody details he knows by heart
and utterly loves. Try to tell these well-
known tales in new words, or to vary by so
much as a single added rat the description
of Cinderella's coach, or by the slightest
quaver your famous imitation of the wolfs
howl. Omit if you dare one commiserating
word from the doctor's remarks on dressing
your' afflicted member; do any of these
things, and see how that child will behave.
You won't try it again.

The desire to hear the same stories — there
is a group of them — in approximately the
same words, is a desire that never dies out
of the human heart With what a wild de-
light we follow the devoted Oswald and the
199

Cinderella

unfortunate Amanda through their so in-
timately known trials to the so thoroughly
foreseen finale. With what touching rap-
ture we applaud that delicious familiar em-
brace, in the limelight just before the last
curtain. What pleasure equals the so thrill-
ing one of beginning once more, between
other covers and under a new title — for so
much our maturity demands — that first
chapter describing the poor and lovely hero-
ine, the cruel, rich relations, the adumbrated
Prince. Blessed Cinderella! She is our
first and dearest. Trusting innocence con-
fronting the perils of the world and issuing
from between their jaws unharmed, neither
older nor wiser — Red Riding Hood comes
next. Close behind labours the simple un-
varnished tale of personal adventure; of
clean, carefully posed, copyrighted experi-
ence, the story that bears the same relation
to life as a J. G. Brown newsboy does to
his alien namesake of the street.

We have the same demands in our age as

in our childhood — we want that cheerful

"and they lived happy ever after," heaps

of jewels and chests of gold continue to

200

Cinderella

attract us, and if we seem to desire a bit
more of the romantic than in our earlier
days, yet it is still a romance not too close to
reality, having but the slightest relation to
our own human nature. And humour? We
want that brightly labelled, with a white and
scarlet grin not unlike that worn by the
clown who used to gladden our circus days.
These modifications are slight and the main
fact is certain. We want the same old sto-
ries created after a pattern whose least de-
tail is known to us. We like to know what
to expect and not to be disappointed in those
expectations. Those details, each least one
of them, how beloved they are ! When once
again the heroine draws her slight figure
to its full height, we sigh with satisfaction.
When she spurns her rich suitor with the
words, "Rather death than dishonour," we
glow with the fine reflected virtue. When
the hero exclaims, "No man can insult a
woman in my presence and live," we simply
stand up and shout — it's all too splendid!
Then when the father relents and draws her
to him with that broken "Me chield," the
tears rush to our eyes, and we lay down the
201

Cinderella

book with a sense of having got all we asked
for. It goes on the shelf with the long,
long line of its fellows, reaching back into
the dusky past, spilling over beyond the
moment when books began, merging with
the tales told by dark Arabs, making strange
and graceful gestures as they stood in the
centre of a silent ring of their comrades,
silent unless the story teller should slip on
a phrase or an incident and rouse a quick
comment, a sound of dissent. But he does
not often slip; the tale is too well known,
has been too often repeated. And we, tak-
ing up book after book, are as little likely
to have to record any innovation or to be
jarred by any real divergence. The presses
turn out the completed ones in their bright
new covers, the authors take up the blank
pages on which they will transcribe those
still to come, and the critics thump the tom-
tom and blow on the pipes and clash the
cymbals with quite the delightful fervour of
a group of Oriental musicians, who burst
into sudden sound and fury from some
arched doorway in a narrow street, and as
suddenly, as unaccountably, sink back into
202

Cinderella

silence. Nothing could be pleasanter than
the whole affair from beginning to end.
Everyone gets what he wants, and no one
seems to lose. A prize in each package!
Walk up, ladies and gentlemen, and buy
any book on the table. Here they are, the
romantic, the adventurous, and the plain
and straightforward; also in combinations
to suit every taste.

So the ladies and gentlemen step up in
their hundreds and thousands to buy Cin-
derella and Red Riding Hood and the story
about the cut thumb. See how pleased they
all are, and listen to the glorious thump-
thump, clash-clash, and wrirr-wrirr of the
critics. How it helps to drown the sighs
and sounds of struggle that might otherwise
insist on getting themselves heard, and how
completely it banishes thought, with all its
burdensome concomitants, out of the minds
of the readers. Please tell me a story be-
fore I go to sleep, begs the child, its eyes
shining as you begin the well-known inci-
dents. And please tell us a story to keep us
asleep, cry the ladies and gentlemen.

But the children have an advantage, nor
iC3

Cinderella

is it one lacking in importance. With the
child it is a pure and strong imagination
that makes one story sufficient for him.
Into that he can throw all of mystery, won-
der, rapture, and adventure. The words are
wings which take him far on strange and
varied journeys. But with those who are
not children it is rather a fatal lack of im-
agination, a lassitude of mind, a vacancy of
emotion, that is signalled by this continued
love of Cinderella. They don't want to be
forced out of themselves, they do not wish
to contend with the great thoughts and
powerful feelings that shake the little world.
Don't disturb them, don't excite them ; what
they want is to sleep — hush now, and
begin

"Once upon a tim e *

THE VALLEY ROAD

THERE are expanses of sea and land
that impose on the spirit a weight of
grandeur, that shape it, as it were, after their
own image, extending it beyond its mor-
tal limit, deepening its shadows, heighten-
ing its sublimities, lifting it into a region
wonderful and fine, yet where each breath
comes with an effort, where each moment
is an exhaustion. For a while you become
one with the sombre and intense beauty,
living a moment of supreme ecstasy. But
then the weak and ineffectual wings of ex-
altation flutter and. droop. The ether is too
rare; one cannot longer sustain one's self
therein; one becomes oppressed and faint
There are also smiling and gentle views,
lake and wood, hills against an evening sky,
the glow of dawn behind dark pine trees,
golden wheat fields, laughing brooks that
do but soothe and caress the spirit. With
205

The Valley Road

these one may live year after year, con-
tinually refreshed, continually discovering
some new loveliness, never overawed, never
utterly swept from one's mooring, keeping
firm hold of the thread of personality. And
if one requires sublimity and terror to teach
the immensity of the Eternal plan, the huge
scope of the Universal Spirit, one needs,
too, the more tender and charming remind-
ers of the essential helpfulness and simple
friendliness in life.

As with the objects of the visible world,
so also with the creations of the imagina-
tion. There are those works of art which
speak in the voice of passion and genius
of the great elemental things of life, and
others which murmur, as though in the
tones of a friend, of the usual facts of ex-
istence. We read " Macbeth," and from
the instant when the wild heath and fan-
tastic witches create for us the conception
of a man struggling under the dominion of
a fierce and ungoverned imagination, giving
us, as it were, the very reflection of his
soul, to that last battle against supernormal
odds, we move amid the desolate mountain
206

The Valley Road

peaks and precipices of the human spirit.
The reading of such a thing is like hewing
a road into the depths of the vast and mys-
terious forest by which we are surrounded.
We penetrate some distance, we hear voices
that half reveal what lies yet further on.
But we must return to live in the valley,
the sunshine, to breathe again the spring
air and hear children laughing at their
play. Perhaps Charles Lamb has given us
more work of this friendly and intimate
nature than any one else. One feels the
personality, the very warmth of the hand-
clasp, the intimate look and smile.

It is this gentle and brotherly note which
is struck by Arthur C. Benson. His books
do not impress one with any dominant
beauty or soul-piercing passion; but they
get themselves loved. You read them with
an ever-increasing admiration. They do
not, it may be, tell you anything you do not
already know, but they remind you of many
things which you are glad of knowing and
which you need to remember. Life is after
all made up chiefly of simple things — what
else does the old story of the handful of
207

The Valley Road

dust mean? And it is good to emphasise
this fact Nor is a hint of the more subtle
and mysterious pressure exerted upon us
altogether lacking in his essays and stories.

He employs an infinite detail in his work,
a detail which is not wearying, which is, on
the contrary, as comfortable and satisfying
as a wood fire on a rainy day. The mystery
of pain and loss constantly engages Mr.
Benson's attention. He will not believe
that there is not a Divinity moving toward'
ultimate, perfect good, and yet he cannot
understand why it should so often move by
the slippery, weary road of suffering. Con-
stantly in his writings you meet the ques-
tion and the wonder. The answer he gives
us is not so definite. He opposes a simple
faith, a childlike optimism, to whatever
doubt is stirred up in his heart He does
not take the question into the depth of his
spirit, but holds it off, throwing about it
such beauty of sacrifice, gentleness, spirit-
ual peace as he sees engendered by it

If, however, we come to believe that the
object of life is not so much the acquire-
ment of happiness as the building of a
30$

The Valley Road

human soul, then, too, we may see that the
mixed and sad and turbulent elements that
enter into it are perhaps more fortunate
than we conceive of. To a backward glance
much is revealed that was hidden when it
stood face to face with us : and were we not
so fearful of suffering we might attain to a
more perfect apprehension of its value.
After all, it is doubtful if any one would be
willing, even had he the power, to erase
from his memory the sorrow and pain which
he has endured. It is too much his own,
•he dearly won child of his soul.
. Mr. Benson's philosophy is carried along
on the quiet flow of his humour much as
the silver current of a river bears a boat
insensibly but surely. His insight into
human nature is keen, and he has a wise
tolerance for faults and an amused smile
for foibles. As you read him you are aware
of a distinct gain. You are in the company
of a mind pure and serene, of a heart that
understands much and is tender to all.
Something precious has been imparted to
you, and you are the better for the hours
spent in reading these books.
209

The Valley Road

Sometimes in walking through an un-
known bit of woodland one chances on a
dark and quietly serene pond, a pool amid
the trees that looks small and shallow, and
hardly draws the eye from the flickering
sun and shade playing their immortal game
of hide-and-seek over the tree trunks and
through the shrubbery. Yet, should one
pause and look down into the brown water
one presently finds it a difficult matter to
resume the tramp. The pool holds you. Its
golden reflections, its peace, its mysterious
silence, mean more from moment to mo-
ment. The woods you have been walking
through are lovelier seen through its re-
vealing medium. There is the exquisite
tracery of a bough against the sky, here a
gleam of scarlet on yonder wayfaring tree
that you would have passed unnoticed. It
may be that the pond brings to you nothing
which you might not have seen for your-
self. But you see it all now through the
clear beauty of its own observation with an
addition of tranquillity in itself a beauty.
It is no longer woods and leaves and cloud
you see, but their spiritual expression. As

2IO

The Valley Road

the pool holds in its heart the essence of
summer and winter, transmuting them into
something pure and magical, so does this
author gather into his books the simple
surrounding facts of life, and holding them
in the solution of his imagination, make
spiritual truth of them.

211

THE BURNING BUSH

BOOKS and books — and here and there
one which, for some or another rea-
son, makes a commotion ; gets talked about,
gets advertised, gets discussed, succeeds
even in getting read. Three in particular
have of late been the subject of many per-
sons' attention; letters and editorials have
appeared about them in the daily press, and
there has been much praise and a vast
amount of thought heaped upon them.
There is also a fourth book, which has been
neither so widely advertised nor so enthu-
siastically discussed as the others ; of which,
indeed, people seem to have nothing what-
soever to say.

The first three books owe their existence
to women. Women who, while being
Americans, are yet intimately acquainted
with English and Continental society, who
have lived abroad almost as much as at
2U

The Burning Bush

home, and who are thoroughly cosmopol-
itan. They are, moreover, women whose
minds are trained and keen, who possess
the habit of wit and are masters of the
technique of their art. They stand in the
front rank of the writing millions, and their
work commands a wide public and a seri-
ous attention. Each has, of course, her
special champions, but all three belong to
the reading public. The last book is by a
man, a foreigner, and concerns itself with
a country far from our own.

Two of the women, Mrs. Wharton and
Mrs. Atherton, are noticeably inspired by
the intellect rather than the emotions, and
the deep impression made by them is a
subtle criticism on the present phase of our
life; for in the chorus of praise they evoke
one detects no sense of something not there,
no shiver of an acknowledged chill. Mrs.
Atherton has a tendency toward politics,
picked up apparently in England, a ten-
dency evident in several of her books, and
forming the basis of the present volume,
"Ancestors," a book written to prove that
America is as fair a field for an ambitious
213

The Burning Bush

man as England, even when that ambition
turns to political achievement. Politics in
her hands does not, however, become a fac-
tor in developing the human being; it is
not a living force, but a game to be played,
with or without honour, according to the
character she is depicting. The heroine of
this story is a self-contained, self-satisfied
young woman, who, after a slight but un-
fortunate experience and some superficial
observation of life, discovers that love is
apt to be associated at one time or another
with sorrow or unrest. She therefore con-
cludes to put it away and to lead a life
entirely within herself. And though the
denouement of the story is seemingly in-
tended to show that love is too strong for
her, it does not actually succeed in so doing.
We remain convinced that she is quite safe
against any disturbance; her particular and
personal ambition will continue to be her
chief aim and sensation. Mrs. Atherton
gives us a graphic picture of the cataclysm
of earth and fire that sweeps through San
Francisco; but even the suspicion that such
upheavals are possible to the human heart
214

The Burning Bush

would appear strangely out of place in re-
gard to any of the cleverly drawn charac-
ters who contribute their assistance to this
story. We indeed get no more than a
drawing-room acquaintance with any of
Mrs. Atherton's characters. She reveals
nothing of the inner springs of their life
which we might not ourselves discover in
the ordinary intercourse of society. They
are simply people whom we meet, to whom
certain things occur, and who thereupon
cease to be — as far as we are concerned.

Mrs. Wharton writes with a more delib-
erate art, with a satisfying finish. She is
wholly devoid of humour, but humour as an
asset in the world amid which her creations
move would be absolutely undesirable.
These people must take each other and be
taken with the utmost seriousness. One
whole-hearted laugh would melt their icicle
existences entirely away.

One enters here in quietness, admiring
the chiselled perfection of the archway, the
careful poising of stone on stone, the meas-
ured proportions and balanced spaces. The
acoustic properties of this theatre are excel-
215

The Burning Bush

lent, and we hear every whisper of the
actors who play their carefully thought-out
parts with careful discretion. There will
be no shrieks, no mess, no broken heads or
hearts. Even if there is at times an ap-
pearance of these distressing relics of prim-
itiveness, we know it is only an appearance.
The dagger is at most driven into a saw-
dust heart, the scream is modulated to ac-
cord with the orchestral accompaniment
The play being over, we applaud, we rise,
and we depart precisely as we entered.

Whether Mrs. Wharton could draw an-
other type of men and women is neither
here nor there. That there are a great
many persons who move through just such
a world as she depicts, and manage this big
business of living just as she indicates, is
assuredly true. It all exists, and Mrs.
Wharton is interested in its portrayal. She
does it excellently, if somewhat self-con-
sciously, and we must needs be grateful, in
a hurried age, for evidences of a love of
perfection for its own sake.

Some one has said, " Never make a gen-
eral statement about women, because at
216

The Burning Bush

most you know a hundred or two, and the
other millions probably don't in the least
resemble any of your particular collection/'
But one may perhaps venture on a gener-
alisation of Mrs. Wharton's women, the
women she is making familiar to us in one
book after another; the women she has
drawn with a fine point, decisively, yet with
an extraordinary lack of sympathy. These
women are creatures of the intellect, and
the passions which disturb the current of
their cold-flowing lives are of the mind, not
of the heart. One suspects it is boredom
which has thrown them into the arms of
their lovers, when such a consummation
occurs, rather than any overpowering emo-
tion. It is never the madness of love which
has swept them over barriers, good or evil,
but an obsessing weariness, a smallness of
soul which can discover in the legitimate
acts of life neither their beauty nor their
greatness. These women express not ex-
cess, but emptiness. Having nothing within,
they cannot become conscious of anything
without. Their acts leave one unmoved.
One does not care whether one of them dies
217

The Burning Bush

in a garret or marries the rich Jew. It
is immaterial whether another deserts her
husband or sacrifices herself for her son.
It doesn't matter to us, because we are
instinctively assured that it doesn't matter
to them. They would care very much if
they were made to appear ridiculous or
underbred; above all, they do not want to
lose caste, and appearance is the gigantic
fetish of their lives, the great pseudo-fact
which sways the currents of their white
blood.

In her last book, "The Fruit of the
Tree," Mrs. Wharton uses the dramatic sit-
uation in which the opposing ideas repre-
sented by labour and capital now stand in
such clear definition as the background on
which to spread the web of her plot. The
plot itself poses an ethical question which
it answers in so far as to make the taste
of the fruit bitter in the mouth, but, with
that artistic restraint which Mrs. Wharton
can always be depended upon exercising,
the answer is not crammed down the
reader's throat.

The great fault of the book is its life-
2i8

The Burning Bush

lessness. That background of workers at
the mills is never a living, breathing entity.
They never speak a conscious word nor
make a passionate gesture ; the whole crowd
of them remains curiously, extraordinarily
non-existent. There is a lot of pother over
them, and persons rush hither and thither
and do this and that simply because of them.
But the impression produced is more farci-
cal than moving, for it is as though all this
agitation were conducted in behalf of silhou-
ettes painted on a screen. We are told of
the sorrows and trials of these silhouettes,
but somehow the inner conviction of their
being no other than moving shadow-shapes
persists. The actual characters of the story
are put before us with a finesse and surety
that is delightful in its effect of art. You
have no slightest affection for any of them,
but you do have a keen interest in observ-
ing the thoroughly capable manner in which
they are handled, as well as the consum-
mate knowledge displayed by the author in
regard to what should be left out. The book
seems, indeed, to be written largely to ex-
ploit this power, and we recognise the suc-
219

The Burning Bush

cess of the attempt with pleasure. Only
we must deplore the fact that in the process
some things which, however coarse and
awkward, are yet extremely necessary, have
also been excluded — if so be they ever
really attempted an entrance into this liter-
ary Faubourg. The great sob and struggle
of the upward movement of the world, now
beginning to beat almost terribly against
our consciousness, finds no least echo in
the pages of this book, that is yet suppos-
edly built upon it.

As cleverness is the presiding genius that
sits at Mrs. Atherton's elbow, keeping one
constantly responding to the digs and winks,
if one may speak vulgarly, of its sparkling
personality, so with Mrs. Wharton it is
breeding. Breeding is, as it were, a lux-
ury of hers, a cult, and one is subcon-
sciously and yet constantly aware of her
behind the book, seated in a graceful and
composed attitude, while she arranges the
incidents and characters according to her
intricate and curious design. There is a
feeling, not too insistent, of a hovering but-
ler only waiting the sound of a bell to

220

The Burning Bush

hasten up and remove all signs of this in-
trusion of the outer world. Then the em-
broidered portieres fall and exquisite har-
mony once more resumes control. The book
has been finished; no one has talked loudly
nor gesticulated violently; it has all been
so perfectly and tactfully managed, even
though concession was made to popular
prejudices and some rather rough customers
let in.

Mrs. Burnett is both more simple and
straightforward and more rounded than
either of the preceding writers. She is
able to create a sweet, sympathetic, and liv-
ing personality. Such a woman as she
draws in Emily, in " The Methods of Lady
Walderhurst," has a quality peculiarly vital
and lovable. She produces upon you a dis-
tinct and lasting impression — you do not
forget her. This is where Mrs. Burnett
differs from either Mrs. Wharton of Mrs.
Atherton — that you grow fond of her char-
acters. In "The Shuttle" she has not
perhaps equalled the achievement of " Lady
Walderhurst," but you respond to her char-
acters. You like her heroine, too flawless

221

The Burning Bush

though she is; you like the latter's sad little
sister and the hero and the minor person-
ages, particularly the travelling man from
America who sells typewriters and hutts
into the story on an overset bicycle with all
his slang and good-nature and shrewdness
thick upon him. These people all know how
to love each other; their sorrow, their pas-
sion, are real — you, too, feel them. Mrs.
Burnett may do things her two sister-
writers would never do — but then she also
does things they never can do. She makes
you feel, she brings tears to your eyes, and
after you have finished one of her books
you sit awhile and ponder over this strange
human nature, capable of such blunders and
such heroism. You have learned some-
thing, not because you have been told any-
thing new, but because of the fact that you
have been made to feel; and it is only
through feeling that the soul progresses.

Mrs. Atherton has a restless, eager mind,
the mind of an unsatisfied woman touched
with a weary cynicism that finds everything
in the world a little faded. She expresses
that phase of present-time womanhood
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The Burning Bush

which seeks to fulfil itself solely through
the intellect, which, yielding to a cheap dis-
illusion, puts aside the emotional life as a
thing unworthy itself and fills up the vac-
uum that ensues with a quantity of words.

Mrs. Wharton impresses one chiefly with
her immense artistic taste, her frequent
brilliant wit, and a somewhat bourgeois
aloofness from the common herd that seeks
to hide even from itself by a prolonged
stare into the unpleasantness of this under-
world. One recognises the influence of
Henry James on her technique, but inspira-
tionally she occupies the opposite pole from
him, for whereas he concerns himself solely
with the spiritual processes, the inner life
of his characters, Mrs. Wharton's probe
reaches no farther than to the idiosyn-
crasies and little outward manifestations
that differentiate man from man.

But Mrs. Burnett has a heart. She runs
to meet the men and women of the world
from whatever direction they may be com-
ing because she loves them; and for that
same reason they end by telling her secrets
that the other two will never hear and can-
223

The Burning Bush

not guess, even as in the old fairy tales the
trees and animals told marvels to the sim-
ple and loving child which they forever
withheld from her far cleverer and more
splendidly attired, but unsympathetic sisters.

And the fourth book? It is the story of
a peasant woman, a handful of rough Rus-
sian workingmen, the dreary background of
a factory town, the hopeless struggle of a lit-
tle band of seeming visionaries against over-
powering odds. Yet by some singular magic
we are given in this simple story the soul of
humanity with all its elements of beauty and
ugliness; and the ugliness is so illumined
by the immense comprehension of genius
that before even the most brutal acts we
are filled with a terrible pity, a new under-
standing of the secrets of life. Before the
sublime honesty and tenderness of the look
that questions her Life has dropped her
mask, showing at once her grimmest wounds
and her purest beauty. In the acts and
words of these few poor persons w$ realise
the tragedy and triumph of man. And
though the story is one of suffering, of
224

The Burning Bush

pitiful outrages and death, yet somehow,
and despite the cry for help that rings in
the heart, it is a joyful, a glorious story.
It tells the old and ever-new tale of the
soul's awakening, of how for the sake of
a great idea a man will lay down his life,
will even live in pain and horror with a
high heart and a noble courage. Warm
with the knowledge of such a truth, we
can turn our faces to the sun and lift
our head; for whatever else betide, this,
too, is.

In the Mother Maxim Gorky has made
the heroine of his book we watch the crea-
tion of a human soul in the dull body of a
peasant woman. No creation is possible ex-
cept by love, and it is the awakening of
love in the stunted darkness of the terrible
life led by the working classes of Russia
that brings about the mysterious birth. At
first this new soul is timid, weak, uncer-
tain, a frail child hardly conscious of itself.
But slowly it grows into the perfect mother-
soul that knows nothing of fear, that is
stronger than the whole world, because it
loves all the good in that world as its own
225

The Burning Bush

child, that is as certain in its every act as
is the operation of those tremendous laws
that swing the universe.

Yet this woman, so exquisite, so noble, so
simple, is only the symbol Gorky uses to
express the new-born spirit of Russia.
Infinitely gentle and loving, infinitely pow-
erful, this spirit has realised itself. And
in this book, in the words which these peo-
ple say to each other, as in their manner
of meeting everything that comes to them;
in their smiles, their playfulness, their joy,
their courage and conviction, you see this
soul, this mother-soul, turning to the un-
comprehending world with a gesture so ten-
der and so strong that nothing will be able
to resist it.

Suffering, pain, and insult meet the men
and women of this story as they struggle
along, toiling, dying. But should you pity
them, they say:

"We are already rewarded for every-
thing; we have found a life that satisfies
us; we live broadly and fully with all the
power of our souls. What else can we de-
sire ?"

226

The Burning Bush

A sentence, a word, and we understand
a generation.

" ' The History of Slavery ' Yefim read
out again, and asked Pavel : ' Is it about
us?'"

The mother, speaking of some one, says:

" I'm so afraid of that man. He's just
like an overheated oven. He does not warm
things, but scorches them."

And this wonderful description: "You
have nothing to tell me, nothing. My heart
is so — it seems to me as if wolves were
howling there."

On every page there are sentences that
write themselves in the heart. A lofty
poetry inspires them, and at the same time
something intimate and homely. Everything
is new, and yet everything seems to have
been yours always.

Things happen in this book that should
never be allowed to happen anywhere at all.
They are awful, impossible, one cannot bear
them, lost in the comfortable dream that all
is for the best:

" ' And when you wake up/ continued the
Little Russian, '. . . and look around
227

The Burning Bush

you, you see it's all filthy and cold. All
are tired and angry; human life is all
churned up like mud on a busy highway,
and trodden under foot. 9 "

Out of the dust of labour and the water
of affliction the characters of this book are
created; but they are created by love, a
love wedded to wisdom, and they bear
within them the sign of the eternal. It is
the groping, striving, pathetic, suffering
soul of us all that Gorky uncovers, with its
blind hate and supreme love, its stupid mis-
takes, its insight like the beam of a search-
light through thick night, its childishness,
its profundity, its astounding hope, its des-
perate weariness. And in spite of failure
and prison and death, the spirit of the book
is yet one of splendid joy. It takes the
heart like a great melody and sweeps it to
the fine heights of life. It seems to throw
an arm about you and to smile into your
eyes. No one can read it and remain ex-
actly as he was. Something very beautiful
is met in it, so beautiful that it seems as
though you had seen something quite new.
It is like meeting Christ, full of strength,
228

The Burning Bush

smiling, understanding everything, after a
long time of noise and confusion and bit-
terness. For in Russia, side by side with
the greatest cruelty and depravity, the
grossest stupidity, there is a spiritual force,
a pure understanding, a perception of es-
sential truth and good, and an utter sim-
plicity in accepting personal suffering for
the sake of their ultimate victory, existing
nowhere else. This book, although it be-
longs to the whole world, could have been
written only by a Russian. Inspired by an
ideal of freedom based on love, these men
and women, once brutal, coarse and stupid,
each isolated in a terrible mud-hole of his
own, have attained an elevation so lofty
that only the purest ether surrounds them.
There is no longer any obstruction, and soul
recognises soul with scarcely any interfer-
ence from the body. Only the highest
breeding is capable of such sincerity and
simplicity as they manifest, and the wisdom
which they speak from the warm depths of
their hearts cannot be surpassed by the lofti-
est intelligence.
Maxim Gorky has revealed to us a new
229

The Burning Bush

world, a world already forming in man-
kind. He has done this in words so plain,
with the assistance of characters so simple,
that we only gradually understand what is
being accomplished. But in the end we see
that it is genius by whose side we have
been walking. Genius alone has the power
of reading the words God writes within us
and speaking them again so that all may
hear. Few of us know, or at least remem-
ber, that there are such words to interpret.
We are aware only of the outer pages, of
the manifold sentences we have ourselves
written and wrapped about us, and when
these sentences are unrolled and repeated to
us we welcome them eagerly and under-
stand them readily. So that those persons
of instruction and talent who spend their
time upon these outer husks are sure of a
speedy recognition and alert attention. Of
such are the three writers first discussed in
this paper. Of these three Mrs. Burnett's
book comes nearest the centre of life, is
less self-conscious, less egoistical. It is
spontaneous, it has grown, in contradis-

230

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tinction to the other two, which have been
distinctly made.

But Gorky's book opens for us the ever-
lasting gates and draws from living waters.
We are richer and happier after having
read it. It answers once more, power-
fully and nobly, that question old as the
human race — " Am I my brother's keeper ? "
It answers it by showing you the heart of
that brother, which is no other than your
own heart, and saying quite simply: Be-
hold ! he loves you — or, if he does not, it is
because as yet he does not understand.

" Everybody loves what is near," says the
Little Russian, " but to the great heart what
is far is near also."

531

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Full text of "Women and Other Women: Essays in Wisdom"

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